


Sign of Three

by YourFairyGodfather



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: I Blame Tumblr, Inappropriate Humor, i love that that was even a tag, weird domestic trio
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-01-07 18:17:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 46,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1122858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourFairyGodfather/pseuds/YourFairyGodfather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was no hint of it in her letters, no warning of her coming. She simply arrived one afternoon in late September, the autumn wind tugging at her coat and a small suitcase at her feet as she waited patiently on the front porch for one of them to open the door. </p>
<p>For all her certainty that she would one day circumvent the system and become a free woman, Sherlock could safely admit that he hadn’t seen this one coming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the beginning

**Author's Note:**

> The beginning of a series of Joan/Sherlock/Moriarty drabbles; entirely platonic...or are they.

There was no hint of it in her letters, no warning of her coming. She simply arrived one afternoon in late September, the autumn wind tugging at her coat and a small suitcase at her feet as she waited patiently on the front porch for one of them to open the door.   
When he finally did, she greeted him with her soft, winning smile, perfectly outlined with her favored brand of cosmetics which he knew for a fact she hadn’t had access to in her prison warehouse.

“I did tell you I’d be out within the year,” she reminded him, gently filling in his uncharacteristically shocked silence. “I don’t suppose you have space on the roof for me to work? My easel should be arriving shortly. I can paint downwind of your hives to avoid disturbing the bees, if you like.” 

For all her certainty that she would one day circumvent the system and become a free woman, Sherlock could safely admit that he hadn’t seen this one coming.

 

_______________________________________________________________~~___________________________________________________

 

To say that Joan had some initial reservations about the new arrangement would be something of an understatement.

“No,” she said flatly, upon looking up from the toaster to see Moriarty, who had followed a suitcase-toting Sherlock through the kitchen door—criminal mastermind and murderess or not, she was still a lady, and English manners would out. “No, no, no, _are you insane_ , no, no. Not happening.”

Sherlock grimaced. 

Moriarty smiled. “I had every intention of leaving the pair of you alone upon my release,” she lied easily, transparently. “But I’m afraid that my newfound freedom does come with some restrictions—I’ve been told that it will take your government several days to remove the holds on many of my financial accounts, leaving me somewhat pressed for income in the short term. And even if money weren’t an issue, I’m not entirely at liberty as of yet—given the number of organizations, legal and otherwise, with their eyes on me at the moment, international travel looks to be more trouble than it’s currently worth.

“I have other resources, of course,” she added, picking up an apple from the bowl of fruit on the counter and studying it causally before putting it back. “But the time it would take to access them is similar, and I’m in no particular hurry to leave the city.”

Clearly noting Joan’s look of extreme displeasure, Sherlock rocked back and forth slightly on his feet, swinging his arms awkwardly—a gesture historically followed by exasperating information, in Joan’s experience. 

He did not disappoint. “I am assured that this arrangement, though no doubt somewhat odious to you, is indeed a temporary one,” he promised, with the faux cheer of a man who knew that he was fooling absolutely no one. “A week, perhaps; ten days at the most. Obviously, you are welcome to stay here if you so choose—this is your home, and you are within your right to come and go as you please. However, out of respect for your privacy—“

Joan scoffed, conveying skepticism and irritation in equal measure.

“—and given your pointed, understandable dislike of our current houseguest,” Sherlock continued, ignoring the interruption, “I am prepared to arrange for you to stay elsewhere in the interim. A hotel, if you prefer, or one of my father’s other properties. Perhaps with Ms. Hudson; I have it on good information that her current paramour is out of the country until the first of the month, and she’s currently in the market for an assistant in translating her latest work—it’d be an excellent learning opportunity for you.”

Joan crossed her arms, leaning against the counter. “And you can’t put _her_ up in a hotel because, why?” she asked, glaring openly at both of them. 

Sherlock opened his mouth to answer, but Moriarty beat him to it. “Security,” she answered brightly, easily matching Sherlock’s false cheer. “My recent…inactivity has given many of my enemies the chance to consolidate power and amass their resources. I’m afraid nothing New York has to offer in the way of hotels can match the kind of home security that you and Sherlock have here in the brownstone. I’ll be much safer here than anywhere else.” 

“Because putting the serial murderer _inside_ the apartment just screams ‘safety’,” Joan retorted, ignoring the smell of burning toast behind her and instead turning to Sherlock. “You can’t possibly think that staying here alone, with a criminal mastermind that you have extensive personal history with, is in any way a good idea,” she reasoned, her stare hard.

Sherlock’s posture straightened as he beamed back at her. “So you’re staying, then,” he deduced, clapping his hands in front of him. “Excellent.”

“And get murdered in my bed right along with you?” Joan shot back, disbelieving. “I’m curious, did you put any sort of thought into this plan _at all_ before agreeing to it, or did you just feel bored today and decide that letting an extremely dangerous criminal stay with us would liven things up?”

Moriarty held up a finger. “If I could just interject and remind you that I _have_ stayed here before without murdering either of you,” she pointed out, “and, in fact, did you a service by shooting as assassin that was rather well bent on killing Sherlock at the time.”

“Ok, you are _not helping_ ,” Joan hissed, holding both of her hands up in exasperation, before pausing and taking a deep breath. 

And immediately began coughing—the toast she had been making to go with her tea was charred beyond recognition, and smoke was beginning to pour out of the toaster.

Bypassing the switches entirely and angrily yanking the cord right out of its socket, Joan turned back to Sherlock and Moriarty, who were watching her with slight concern and infuriating condescension, respectively. “All right,” she sighed, resigned. “Here’s the deal: I’m going to call Captain Gregson immediately and tell him about your idiotic plan to let her stay here, and hope that he has _you_ committed and _her_ put into protective custody. If that doesn’t happen, I’m going to ask him what sort of safety measures he would recommend in a case like this, and we will be implementing any and all of his suggestions, without complaint.”

Sherlock leaned forward slightly. “And what if—“ 

“ _Without complaint_ ,” Joan reiterated, and Sherlock shut his mouth with an audible snap. “While _I_ am doing that, _you_ are going to choose several locks from your extensive collection to safeguard all the entrances to my room, including the loose panel at the top of the closet that leads to the storage cabinet in the hall. Call someone to install them or do it yourself, but I want them ready by the end of the day.”

Sherlock thought about it for a moment before nodding sharply. “I’m amenable to your conditions,” he agreed, and leaned over to pick up Moriarty’s suitcase where he’d set it down. “I appreciate your willingness to compromise on the matter, Watson,” he added. “I realize that your— _our_ —previous interactions with Moriarty have been somewhat fraught, and it would not have surprised me greatly if you had called the precinct immediately upon seeing her.”

Joan’s frown softened. “Let’s be clear on this,” she stated, leaning back against the counter. “I’m not doing this for her. I think this is the stupidest plan you’ve ever come up with, there is no way this is going to end well, and I will breathe a lot easier once she’s out of the brownstone and over on the other side of the world. Which, for the record, I’m pretty sure she could make happen today if she really wanted to.”

Joan paused. “But I know you,” she continued, “and I know that if we throw her out now and anything happens to her, you’ll blame yourself. Even if this is a terrible idea.”

Sherlock opened his mouth to reply, paused, and closed it again.

Down the hall, the doorbell rang. 

Sherlock quickly put the suitcase back down. “Your art supplies, I expect,” he said to Moriarty, avoiding Joan’s eye. “If you’ll excuse me.”

He hurried from the kitchen, leaving Moriarty and Joan staring first at the doorway, then at each other.

Moriarty broke the awkward silence first. “I’m curious,” she wondered out loud, tilting her head slightly. “What sort of lock do you expect Sherlock would have that would keep me out, if I decided that I wanted to come in?”

 

_______________________________________________________~~~_______________________________________________

 

The first night was a long one. 

 

_______________________________________________________~~_________________________________________________

 

When Joan woke up from her fitful sleep for what felt like the tenth time, the early morning sunlight was streaming in through the window and shining directly into her eyes. Groaning slightly as she stretched under the sheets, she turned away to face the wall. And froze.

A silver tray, one which had definitely not been there the night before, was resting on the small table next to her bed.

Suddenly completely awake, Joan shifted until she was sitting upright, then carefully lifted the tray from the table and placed it next to her on the mattress. On it was a covered ceramic plate from their kitchen, the kind that Sherlock used to bring her breakfast whenever he dragged her out of bed for a case before she was ready to wake up, and a small, folded piece of paper. 

Joan picked up the paper first—it was cardstock, some of the nicest she’d ever seen; at least as nice as the calligraphied graduation announcements her mother had sent around after she’d completed her final year of medical school. Her name was written across it in beautifully flowing script, and she unfolded it to see a message written in more of the same:

 

_My Dear Watson_ , the note read,

_By the time you are able to read this note, you’ll have noticed that you are in fact still alive, and that I took the liberty of not murdering you in your sleep as you so feared. Please take this realization as a gesture of my goodwill._

_Yours most sincerely,_

_Jamie Moriarty_

 

Temporarily overlooking the alarming fact that Moriarty had been able to break into her room and leave the tray without waking her, Joan lifted the cover off of the plate.

Delicately arranged on the ceramic, and tied with a pink satin ribbon, was a single white peony.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Moriarty's 'brief visit' continues, and Joan is a very good lab rat, right up until she isn't.

If Joan had been home on that particular Thursday, the conversation that began it all likely never would have happened.

Or, if it had, she would have objected strenuously to the entire thing, forcing Moriarty and Sherlock to be…at least a little more _subtle_ in their insanity, thus preserving Joan’s for a little longer. At the very least, she would have had a better idea of how much blame to assign each of the participants, rather than flooding the brownstone with a blanket coating of frustrated disapproval.

On Thursday, however, Joan had an appointment with her therapist. And though their infrequent meetings were not terribly high on her list of priorities, nor something she particularly enjoyed, after three days of her current living arrangement—waking up in a cold sweat at the slightest noise, finding objects that she _knew_ had been in her room moved around the brownstone despite changing the locks again, going through antacids like they were candy (and it was entirely possible that Sherlock had switched them out with actual candy, for all the good that they were doing), suppressing her instinctive flinch every time Moriarty looked at so much as a _butter knife_ wrong—Joan was practical enough to admit that some outside psychiatric help was probably her best chance at making it through the ‘ten days, at the most’ without an ulcer or a nervous breakdown.

  
And after 90 minutes of discussing, in depth, why being only reasonably sure that her partner’s ex-girlfriend/murdering psychopath/criminal mastermind wasn’t planning on slitting her throat over breakfast wasn’t enough to have her screaming for the nearest witness protection program, and why she continued to let Sherlock put her into these absurd, dangerous situations, Joan felt as though she’d earned an extravagantly expensive coffee and a relaxing half an hour at one of her favorite cafes. Just a small, peaceful reprieve from everything before she threw herself back into the fray.

  
If Joan had been home, things might have turned out differently. But because she wasn’t, Moriarty and Sherlock were left alone together on the roof for three hours; her painting an original work that she refused to show anyone, he tending to his bees.  
Until the sound of a scalpel scraping the canvas distracted him, causing him to look over.

  
Moriarty smiled. “Too much yellow,” she explained, holding up the blade. And indeed, when Sherlock squinted, he could see traces of the offending hue streaked on the sharp edge.

  
He frowned, recognizing the tool. “I feel it fair to warn you that Watson will more than likely take umbrage at your purloining her medical equipment for your work,” he offered neutrally. “Particularly given that the item in question is a sharp implement, which, as I’m certain you’ve noticed, makes her ill at ease to see you holding.”

  
Moriarty’s smile grew. “As if you don’t do the same on a regular basis,” she pointed out, reaching for the paint rag on the rickety table next to her and cleaning the scalpel without looking at it. “And perhaps she’ll be more inclined to share her tools once she learns that I intend to give her the painting once it’s completed. I am painting with her particular aesthetics in mind, after all.”

  
Sherlock turned away. “Personal experience is _how_ I know she’d thoroughly disapprove of having her medical bag rifled through,” he admitted, unembarrassed. “And Watson has a rather stringent set of parameters regarding her possessions and their whereabouts—I’m not certain that your intentions regarding her kit will trump your failure to request permission to use it.”

  
There was a pause. Then: “I will admit, the portrait you did of her was exquisite. An excellent likeness, especially when one considers that your in-person acquaintance had, at that juncture, been quite trifling.”

  
Moriarty added a small amount of blue to her brush and went back to work. “Thank you,” she said simply. “I’d be happy to have it sent here, if you like. The landing above the stairs is large enough to support the frame, and it could use some livening up.”

  
“Of course,” Sherlock continued, seemingly oblivious to the offer, “I was rather surprised that you chose not to paint her freckles, given that they’re among the better—and more counterintuitive—of her features.”

  
Moriarty paused almost imperceptibly. “But I did paint them,” she answered, wrist moving delicately as she added details to the canvas that only she could see. “And then I painted over them, as Watson does herself whenever her schedule permits.” She leaned forward, critically eyeing her brushstrokes. “Surely you’ve noticed that Joan applies a layer of concealer whenever you allow her enough time in the morning to indulge her vanities to an appropriate degree, before dragging her off elsewhere.”

  
“With moisturizer and SPF 15 sunscreen,” Sherlock confirmed shortly. “Except in the summer, when she forgoes foundation entirely and merely wears sunscreen.”

  
Moriarty smiled at that. “And I haven’t yet had the opportunity to know her in the summer,” she pointed out. “I merely painted what was there—and exquisitely, as you said.”

  
Sherlock’s frown deepened. “Was it your first true original, then?” he wanted to know. “Obviously, you were working on _something_ before your first…disappearance.”

  
He made a face at that, as if the word was distasteful, yet necessary, in his mouth. “But I never did see it,” he continued, “and I find myself less inclined to trust blindly than I was then.”

  
“If that’s truly the case,” Moriarty wondered aloud, “what difference could my answer make to you? But no,” she continued, “her portrait was not the first, though I do prize it as among the best.”

  
She gazed past Sherlock, her glance sweeping out over the city. “Watson liked it, too, although she doesn’t know that yet,” she confided with a soft smile.

  
Sherlock tilted his head. “I thought her rather unnerved, actually,” he disagreed, “though she took some pains to hide it. In another situation, I’d perhaps be more inclined to defer to your expertise—you having had a rather richer experience than I in reading others’ reactions to your artwork—but I know Watson far more intimately that you do. She’s not readily disposed to flattery in the way one might assume.”

  
Moriarty raised an eyebrow. “My dear Sherlock,” she replied, a hint of scorn in her voice as she turned at last to look at him, “of course she is. Subconsciously, perhaps, but our Watson is no different in that respect than anyone, you and I included.”

  
Sherlock’s eyes, which had narrowed at the mention of ‘ _our_ Watson’, were skeptical. “Even if you were correct in your observation—a premise with which I do not agree—behavioral expression is a much more accurate indicator of a person’s feelings than any Neo-Freudian urge buried to the point of uselessness. Following your example, one could claim any number of unprovable things about Watson, and justify them in such a way that they defy validation or refutation. In short, you’re cheating.”

  
Moriarty put down her brush and crossed her arms. “Oh, Sherlock,” she sighed, eyes narrowing to match his. “Is it really so hard for you to admit that I might know something about your…protégé, that you do not?”

  
Sherlock scoffed theatrically. “Seeing as your statement is an _impossibility_ ,” he spat, “I don’t see the point in admitting anything. You cannot match, in what amounts to maybe a _week’s_ worth of exposure, the knowledge I have accumulated regarding someone with whom I’ve lived and worked for nearly _two years_.”

  
Moriarty didn’t flinch at his agitated tone. “That,” she stated evenly, “sounds distinctly like a challenge.”

  
Slowly, Sherlock began to smile back.

 

* * *

 

If Sherlock had been consulted, he would have used Moriarty’s final statement to blame the entire thing on her.

  
But what, Jamie Moriarty would have countered, did a staggeringly brilliant mind such as Sherlock’s really expect from _such_ a beginning?

 

* * *

 

The opening salvo was the book.

 

“Sherlock?” Watson called from upstairs. “What happened to the book that was in my room?”

Sherlock, who was sitting in the front room attempting to repair a television that was lately prone to losing the signal at inopportune moments, didn’t look up from his screwdriver. “There are several books in your room, Watson,” he yelled back, deftly replacing one of the screws in the chunk of metal he was holding. “You’ll have to be a lot more specific.”

  
He heard the sound of Watson’s shoes clomping down the hall. “The one with the blue cover that was on the table,” she elaborated, her voice significantly closer than it had been. “It was there this morning, and now it’s missing.”

  
“I put it in the drop box outside the library a few hours ago.”

  
Sherlock turned at the sound of her voice—unseen by him, Moriarty had left the kitchen, where she’d been reading the newspaper, and was standing in the doorway.

  
Watson came far enough down the stairs to glare at her. “Why would you do that?” she wanted to know. “You didn’t ask whether or not I was done with it yet—and that’s not even getting into the fact that I’ve asked you a dozen times already to stop breaking into my room.”

  
Moriarty raised an eyebrow in surprise. “But you were done with it,” she pointed out. “You keep whatever you’re currently reading in your purse, in case you have a free moment, or are on the train alone and need something to do. Except last night, you took the book into your room—there were only fourteen pages left, and you wanted to finish it. You kept your light on for twenty-seven minutes after closing your door, but didn’t turn on your computer; instead, you restarted the final chapter to remind yourself what had previously happened, then finished the book.”

  
Watson stared. “I don’t want to know why you know that,” she interjected.

  
Moriarty smiled. “Also, you had no intention of reading it a second time, though you enjoyed it,” she added. “It was due tomorrow, and at nearly four hundred pages, you knew you wouldn’t have the time.”

  
Sherlock watched as Watson closed her eyes in exasperation, holding up her hands as if to stem the flow of deductions. “Whatever,” she groaned, before turning and starting back up the stairs. “Just…ask, before you move my things next time.”

  
Moriarty took a step toward the stairs. “The sequel’s in your purse,” she called up sweetly, and she and Sherlock listened as Watson’s door slammed.

  
Moriarty looked over at Sherlock. “That was among the kinder of the reactions I had anticipated,” she admitted, unperturbed. “There was a 3% chance of her throwing the sequel at my head.”

  
Sherlock, who had been distracted from his work by the small scene, picked the screwdriver back up. “Watson wouldn’t risk damaging the book,” he informed her, adopting a disinterested tone.

  
Moriarty smiled anyway. “Sherlock. You can’t possibly think your partner incapable of losing her temper in such a manner,” she countered easily. “I’m sure you’ve driven her to worse.”

* * *

 

 

Joan, determined not to give Moriarty the satisfaction of knowing…whatever it was the book incident was supposed to prove, deliberately avoided thinking about it for the rest of the day. She did not read three chapters of the sequel before going to bed that night, and she absolutely didn’t have any trouble falling asleep. She remained serene and unmoved.

  
Right up until the moment the next morning when, wrapped in a towel post-shower, she nearly kicked over a pair of steaming coffee mugs that had been left directly outside the bathroom door.

  
“Sherl—“ she started to yell, before cutting herself off—as long as Moriarty was staying with them, she couldn’t blame every bizarre, ridiculous occurrence on Sherlock anymore.

  
Even if shouting at someone would have been somewhat cathartic.

  
Despite not finishing her yell, Sherlock bounded up the stairs and down the hall within seconds, as if he’d been waiting at the bottom of the steps for her call. “Yes, Watson?” he prompted expectantly, hands laced behind his back.

  
Joan gestured at the mugs. “What are these doing in the middle of the floor?” she demanded, readjusting her grip on the towel as Sherlock pointedly looked at her face and nowhere lower. “Because if they’re for an experiment, you need to move them somewhere where I’m not going to kick them over by accident.”

  
Sherlock frowned, puzzled. “I would have thought it would have been obvious, Watson,” he chastised lightly. “They—“

  
He paused, then looked down, his expression changing to one of irritation. “Oh. Yes, I see. You’re exactly right, Watson, and I shall dispose of this for you, post haste.”

  
Bending over, Sherlock snatched one of the mugs off of the floor and strode off with it, leaving Joan with the second mug.

  
Before Joan had a chance to move, she heard a resounding crash come from the direction of the kitchen, one that sounded distinctly like porcelain shattering in the metal sink.

  
“Well, that wasn’t weird at all,” she muttered, gingerly sliding the remaining mug out of the way with her foot, then heading down the hall to her room to get dressed.

  
On her nightstand sat a second set of mugs.

 

* * *

 

The coffee mugs continued to follow Joan around all day.

  
In most of the rooms she went into in the brownstone over the course of several hours, there were pairs of drinks sitting on the floor, or on a table if there was one—one mug of coffee, one of tea. They were always piping hot and apparently freshly made, but as carefully and often as she listened, she could never detect the sound of the coffeepot brewing or the kettle whistling, and both appliances were cold whenever she went into the kitchen to check.

  
The drinks were occasionally accompanied by a scone on a plate, or a blueberry muffin on a stack of paper napkins. Joan hadn’t even known that there were pastries in the house. Or more than a dozen coffee mugs in the cabinets, for that matter.

  
Sometimes, there was only one beverage in the room. Whenever that was the case, it never took Joan long to discover traces of the missing second—drips of coffee on the floorboards, the lingering smell of jasmine over a freshly-watered houseplant, more shards of broken dishware in the sink. After the third smashed mug, Joan gave up and left a dustpan and broom on the counter, carefully sweeping the broken pieces each time into a paper bag to be thrown out in the dumpster behind the building.

  
Throughout it all, Sherlock and Moriarty were suspiciously absent.

 

* * *

 

Both geniuses resurfaced just in time for dinner that night—takeout Chinese that someone other than Joan had ordered—and were on unusually good behavior, passing Joan soy sauce and napkins and pepper without prompting or commentary.

  
Neither one of them would openly admit to assailing her with beverages all day.

  
_Openly_ admit.

  
“You do strike me as more of a coffee drinker when you have the option, Joan,” Moriarty pointed out, delicately teasing out a clump of rice with her chopsticks. “Although separately, you really might consider adding a second teaspoon of sugar to your morning cup, the way the café on the corner that you prefer does—you enjoy it much more, and it’s hardly as if a bit of added sweetness would do you any disservice.”

  
Joan frowned, but Sherlock intervened before she could think of a reply. “Nonsense,” he disagreed, sitting up straighter in his chair but continuing to look down at his food. “Although Watson does enjoy coffee, and with varying amounts of sugar, she prefers tea about seven times out of ten. Caffeinated before 5pm or if we’re working on a case; decaffeinated if she anticipates going to bed at what constitutes a normal hour.”

  
Joan looked back and forth between the two, both of them eyeing her with noticeable anticipation. “But neither of you had anything to do with today,” she stated flatly, barely restraining the eyeroll that desperately wanted to come out.

  
Sherlock, at least, had the good grace to look very slightly ashamed of himself.

  
Joan sighed, folding up her mostly empty takeout carton. “Right. I don’t think I really want to drink anything made by either of you right now,” she admitted, before picking up her plate and napkins and taking them to the kitchen.

* * *

 

 

When the sound of arguing woke her up at 3am—whispers of “ _sabotage_ ” and “ _sugar_ ” and “ _blatant disrespect of sportsmanship_ ” hissing their way through the air vent—Joan only listened long enough to ascertain that neither Moriarty nor Sherlock sounded angry enough to stab the other with a chopstick, before rolling over and going back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Despite coming in at a distant third within the brownstone in the matter of sheer intellect (she hadn’t decided whether Sherlock or Moriarty would win that contest, but she was certain that the minute she decided, the other would immediately deduce it and harangue her for it) Joan was far from stupid. She was well aware that some sort of dick-measuring contest was going on behind the scenes between Sherlock and Moriarty, and was also conscious of the fact that it had something to do with her.

  
She also knew that, being the only one involved with any sense of proportions or social limitations, she probably ought to put a stop to it sooner rather than later.

  
However.

  
Between the low-grade terror of having a mass murderer with an understandable grudge sleeping in the room off of the kitchen, everyone in her life who knew the relevant details being extremely (and loudly) concerned about her sanity—her therapist had recommended a nice, long tropical vacation, and various members of the NYPD had supplied her with no less than six panic buttons—and the minor veiled threats that were quickly becoming the norm—“Do you like turtle soup, Joan? I remember Sherlock and I having dinner at a Singaporean restaurant in the West End that specialized in it. I’ve had better, but he enjoyed it.”—Joan’s nerves were fraying nearly to the breaking point. And while it was incredibly disturbing to have _that much_ attention paid to her every move, whatever was going on was clearly keeping the two of them distracted from other, almost certainly more disturbing plots.

  
Plus, the benefits were nice: warm, clean towels in the bathroom every time she went upstairs for a shower; exactly the right coat and shoes waiting by the front door every time she made to leave the house; precisely the meal she would have chosen for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, before she even knew that it was what she wanted.

  
Sherlock even bought a new, sharper blade for the blender in the kitchen, something he’d been promising to do for weeks but hadn’t ever followed through on.

  
“I decided it was time, Watson,” he announced while proudly showing her the repaired blender, six mornings after Moriarty’s unexpected arrival and three days since both of them had begun being abnormally considerate of Joan. “You’ve taken to running more and longer than usual over the past week, and if this trend continues, you’ll need additional fuel to replenish your diminished glycogen levels.”

  
Joan smiled at him, genuinely pleased. “Thanks, Sherlock,” she offered, peering inside the blender at the incredibly shiny blade. “I haven’t been buying too many smoothie ingredients lately, but I’ll have to stop at the market later and see if they have any—“

  
“Blueberries?” Moriarty interjected from her place at the counter, where she’d been sitting with her cup of coffee, watching the entire interaction. “There’s a fresh pint in the refrigerator, as well as some spinach and strawberries from the farmer’s market.” She smiled dazzlingly at Joan. “Have you tried adding greens to your smoothies? It’s an excellent way to add them to your diet, and it doesn’t affect the taste at all.”

  
“Which, of course, is only made possible by the presence of a blender in the first place,” Sherlock added, shooting a cutting look at Moriarty before smiling at Joan as well. “The salesclerk assured me that the blade will outlive its warranty, but I saved the receipt in the event that he was incorrect. Now—“

  
“One could always make a salad with fruits and vegetables,” Moriarty mused, her nonchalant tone betrayed by the fact that she’d interrupted Sherlock in order to use it, “thereby bypassing the blender altogether.”

  
“Nevertheless,” Sherlock replied, his voice clipped, “you wouldn’t have thought to purchase them in the first place had it not been for the blender.” He nodded to himself, clearly satisfied by his point.

  
Moriarty sat up on her stool, eyes sparkling.

  
Joan put the blender back on the counter. “And that’s my cue to leave,” she said, backing up toward the doorway. “Let me—actually, no, don’t let me know when you’re done with your little spat. I really, really don’t want to know why the two of you have been making me your lab rat this week; I’ll probably never sleep again.”

  
Both heads whipped to look at her, nearly identical expressions of surprise on their faces.

  
Joan stared back. “You’re not exactly subtle,” she pointed out sardonically.

  
Moriarty, probably because she’d never been the recipient of a basketball to the head via Joan, was the first to recover. “Have you been having trouble sleeping?” she asked politely, settling back onto her stool. “I’ve found that memory foam pillows—“

  
“Of course you have,” Joan grumbled, walking out and leaving a bickering Moriarty and Sherlock behind.

  
There was not enough alcohol in the _world_.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone here is so nice :)
> 
> Slight warning for this chapter (see bottom for details) but nothing more intense/graphic than in 2x12.

* * *

_“_ _How is everything going, then?”_ Captain Gregson asked over the phone one night—a question that Joan was getting used to hearing, and not only because a pair of bodyguards and twice-daily personal check-ins had been mandated by the NYPD for the duration of Moriarty’s stay.

Not that Joan was complaining.

“Not so bad, now that the two of them have quit trying to deduce me like it’s some kind of weird competitive sport,” she sighed, tying her hair up into a ponytail and glancing out her bedroom window at the nondescript unmarked car that was parked outside, no doubt containing two of New York’s finest (and currently, at least, unluckiest). “I’m trying not to let my guard down, but it’s exhausting, being on alert 24 hours a day,” she admitted. “Especially when she really hasn’t done anything explicitly criminal yet.”

 _“That we know of,”_ Captain Gregson added darkly. _“Listen, Joan, you know that I’d have you out of there in a heartbeat if I thought that you or that thick-headed partner of yours would listen, but if you insist on staying there, you need to promise me that you’re being careful. We both know what she’s capable of.”_

Joan sighed again. “I know, and I am,” she assured him. “And for what it’s worth, I think—“

Whatever she was thinking, Captain Gregson never found out—startled by a loud shriek from downstairs, Joan dropped her phone, cracking the casing and sending the battery bouncing across the throw rug on the floor.

Barely sparing the pieces a glance, Joan flew across the room and threw open the door. Pausing instinctively in the doorway, she listened as heavy footsteps sounded across the floorboards below, paused briefly, then grew louder as they pounded in her direction. “Watson!” she heard Sherlock call from the foot of the stairs, startled and slightly winded but sounding unhurt. “Watson, we need you!”

Letting out a strangled breath—she hadn’t realized how afraid she’d been for Sherlock until after he’d yelled her name, proving that he was all right—Joan hurried across the hall and down the stairs.

Sherlock was waiting for her, paler than usual. “Moriarty dropped a knife in the kitchen and slashed her arm quite badly,” he explained, his voice clipped and impatient as he rushed her down the last few steps and across the room. “She may require stitches. Perhaps a trip to the hospital, if you think it necessary, though I doubt she’d go in for any painkillers worth the name.”

“What was she doing with a knife?” Joan asked warily, following Sherlock into the kitchen and taking in the sight of Moriarty, face pale and ashen, clutching a bloodstained towel to her left arm with crimson-streaked fingers.

Joan paused, staring. If she hadn’t known better—and she absolutely did—she would have said that Moriarty looked almost…afraid.

Clearly having heard the question, Moriarty attempted a shaky, rueful smile. “Making dinner,” she explained with a nod toward the cutting board on the opposite counter, which was heaped with a pile of cut vegetables. She shifted uneasily on her stool, grasping her injured arm closer to her chest. “Just my ill luck that I had your knives sharpened yesterday, I suppose.”

Joan’s stomach dropped. “You had our knives sharpened,” she stated flatly, her esteem for the officers parked outside diminishing rapidly. “As in, walked out of the brownstone and all around the city with a large number of lethal weapons.”

Moriarty frowned. “I waited until you were out; I know how the sight of me with anything more dangerous than a toothpick tends to alarm you,” she pointed out, voice bordering on petulant. “And given that _you_ are more than likely going to be sewing up _my_ arm, rather than the other way around, I’d say I have slightly more cause to complain about that decision at the moment than you do, wouldn’t you agree?”

Joan opened her mouth, not entirely sure how to respond, but determined to keep Moriarty from having the last word anyway.

It didn’t turn out to matter, in the end—that was the moment the NYPD, alarmed by Captain Gregson’s frantic call reporting a scream and a dead telephone connection that was now going straight to voicemail, chose to break down the front door.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the ensuing half an hour, it was determined that: Joan and Sherlock were both fine, Moriarty was less fine but was determined not to go to the hospital (“What is the point of living with a former surgeon if she can’t stitch a small cut?” she wondered aloud, echoing Sherlock so uncannily that Joan silently vowed to sweep for bugs—again—the next time she was home alone), the front door would fit back in its frame but would _definitely_ be needing repairs before it functioned as a door again, the NYPD was a bit sheepish but not at all sorry for their course of action, considering the circumstances, and that Sherlock, a credible actor when he put his mind to it, nevertheless couldn’t even begin to disguise his delight over all the chaos, even as he pretended to be miffed over the damage to his foyer.

 

Joan, battling an oncoming migraine and applying a topical disinfectant to Moriarty’s wound as Sherlock sterilized her tools, was somewhat less delighted.

“Has the numbness set in yet?” she asked Moriarty professionally, if a bit shortly, referring to the local anesthetic she’d injected around the site minutes before.

Moriarty smiled distractedly, staring at her arm. “I can barely feel it,” she acknowledged, eyes flicking up briefly at Joan before looking back down. “Forgive me for asking,” she continued lazily, head drooping forward slightly as Joan adjusted her injured arm on the table in front of her, “but you’ve a number of syringes in your home surgery kit—is that standard procedure? They’re quite useful, obviously, but I would think you’d find it a conflict of interest, keeping them in the house as you do.”

Sherlock’s back stiffened slightly, but he otherwise ignored the jab, and Joan followed suit. “Let’s just leave it at ‘you’re fortunate I had them’,” she offered, examining her latex gloves for holes a second time instead of glaring at Moriarty, the way she would have done if it hadn’t been transparent that Moriarty was trying to distract herself from the pain. “And, for the record? I still think you should have this done at a hospital—they have better materials, and insurance would cover any follow-up care you end up needing.”

 

Sherlock turned, holding a tray of neatly-arranged medical instruments in front of him. “Don’t devalue yourself, Watson,” he admonished, gazing at her with an expression that was almost proud as he set the tools down carefully on the table. “She does beautiful work,” he informed Moriarty, “and you’re quite lucky to have the opportunity to experience it firsthand.”

Moriarty smiled at him. “Dire though the circumstances may be,” she agreed, before turning back to Joan. “Hospital paperwork is beyond tedious, even at the best of times,” she explained ruefully. “And even if it wasn’t, Sherlock doesn’t give praise lightly, as you know. I would hardly deprive myself of the opportunity to watch the master at work.”

Joan, sure she was being baited but unable to prove it, said nothing.

Sherlock glanced back and forth between the two of them expectantly. “May I be of assistance in any way?” he inquired, sounding more sincerely enthusiastic by far than was warranted by the situation.

Inwardly, Joan rolled her eyes—as if there was any sort of social protocol for a situation that involved stitching up a criminal mastermind at their kitchen table. Outwardly, she nodded toward the seat to her right. “Sit down over there and hold her hand?” she suggested. “It’ll help keep her arm steady while I’m working, even if you don’t seem like the type to flinch at needles.”

The last remark was directed at Moriarty, who merely raised an eyebrow in response. Sherlock sat in the seat Joan had indicated opposite Moriarty and took her outstretched hand between the two of his, his grip gentle as he anchored her wrist to the table.

Joan set to work. “It’s not as deep as I first thought, but it’s still pretty deep,” she explained, leaning closer as she pierced the thin skin of Moriarty’s forearm. “Three stitches should do it. You were lucky—any deeper, and you probably would have lacerated an artery.”

Moriarty’s arm shifted minutely beneath Joan’s hands as she closed the first stitch and snipped the loose thread. Though she hadn’t said anything as Joan’s needle weaved her skin together, her grip on Sherlock’s hand had tightened and, out of the corner of her eye, Joan watched as Sherlock returned the gesture.

“Did that hurt at all?” she asked Moriarty, a little more sympathetically than before. “I can give you another shot of the painkillers, if you need it.”

Moriarty shook her head, a stray curl falling across her cheek. “Bit of a disconnect, really,” she explained, brushing it away impatiently with her free hand. “I can see it and feel that it ought to hurt, but it’s only pressure.”

If she was lying, it would hardly be the first time a patient had done so to avoid looking weak. Taking Moriarty at her word for the moment, Joan nodded as she began her second stitch, Sherlock leaning forward to watch attentively. “I hear that a lot,” she acknowledged, focusing on her hands as they worked instinctively, many years of practice behind their movements. “Not everyone can look, because the visual alters their perception of the pain. Makes it worse.”

Moriarty scoffed, presumably at the stupidity of anyone who would let their senses detrimentally distort reality.

Even so, she continued to cling tightly to Sherlock’s hand as Joan worked, holding on until after Joan clipped the thread on the final stitch.

“I’ll need to look at it again in the morning, just to monitor it,” Joan ordered, cleaning the closed wound carefully but efficiently before dressing it in sterile gauze. “Try to avoid sleeping on it if you can, and tell me right away if it starts to hurt more than it should.”

Moriarty let go of Sherlock’s hand and wiggled her fingers absently, staring at her bandaged arm in fascination. “And if it needs tending to in the middle of the night?” she wondered laconically, not sparing Joan a glance. “Shall I wake you then, or will you be cross with me for entering your room?”

Joan didn’t react. “My good will doesn’t extend that far,” she answered pointedly, collecting her medical supplies and arranging them in her bag the way she liked them. “In fact, let me be very clear—unless someone in this house is going to die within ten minutes without my medical intervention, I am completely off-limits between midnight and 7am. If you need help during that time, the NYPD is literally steps away from the door, and there’s a very good 24-hour hospital clinic three blocks east of here.”

Moriarty looked at Sherlock, who nodded enthusiastically. “Watson has shouted at me on numerous occasions to avail myself of their services,” he confirmed, “and their reputation is stellar.

“Of course,” he added, “in many instances, Watson’s insistence stemmed from my injuries being somewhat… _beyond_ what she feels ought to be treated in an at-home setting. In your case, I suspect that Watson’s reticence has more to do with her reluctance to allow you any exploitable loopholes through which you could gain access to her boudoir in the middle of the night.”

Moriarty turned back to Joan, eyebrow raised.

Joan shrugged. “That, and I hate people waking me up before dawn,” she explained without a trace of apology.

Moriarty smiled.

Sherlock clapped his hands together. “Yes, takeout, excellent suggestion,” he decided, either not realizing or not caring that nobody had actually suggested anything. “Shall I fetch a menu, or will everyone be having their usual?”

 

* * *

 

 

As Sherlock ordered dinner—testing out his Thai on the hapless employees at Bangkok Gardens—Joan cleaned and put away the last of her tools. Moriarty watched her with hooded, tired eyes.

“Sherlock is correct, you know,” she said suddenly, making Joan pause. “You really do do beautiful work.”

Joan looked over, searching her face for insincerity, but found nothing. “Thank you,” she replied quietly. Moriarty nodded in response, and Joan closed her medical bag and hefted it over her shoulder, intending to take it back up to her room.

When she reached the doorway, though, she paused. “We don’t keep much here, because of Sherlock,” Joan found herself saying. “But there are extra-strength painkillers behind the mirror in the bathroom upstairs, and we can figure out a way to make it work if you need something stronger.”

If Moriarty was surprised by the offer, she didn’t show it. “I’ll keep it in mind,” she answered, stretching her injured arm with a slight wince before looking back at Joan, expression unreadable. “It appears that I am in your debt this evening, Joan Watson.”

Her gaze lingered on Joan’s face, long after Joan left the room.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Living with two genius-caliber intellects, while certainly a daily lesson in perspective, nevertheless didn’t take away from Joan’s own considerable abilities—she was not a stupid person, nor an unobservant one. And whatever their talents, Joan knew that her medical knowledge, after years of schooling, residency, and practical experience, easily outstripped that of everyone else in the brownstone.

Joan also knew that both Sherlock and Moriarty tended to underestimate her, despite Moriarty’s irritated vow not to make the same mistake twice, and Sherlock’s occasional proffers of respect.

It was the combination of the two—her specialized knowledge, and its frequent undervaluing by the two people who really should have known better—that made the situation more complicated than it was at first glance; complicated enough that it kept Joan restless and awake long into the night, despite her fruitless efforts to fall asleep.

Because Joan’s professional opinion, had her patient been anyone else, was that based on the depth, angle, and serration pattern of the knife wound, there was a very good chance—around 90%, give or take—that the accident in the kitchen hadn’t been an accident at all.

It was possible that Moriarty knew that Joan would have known that. It was also possible that Moriarty would assume that Joan, whose medical expertise was more focused on surgical incisions than on fairly shallow lacerations, wouldn’t figure it out. Depending on what expectations and assumptions Moriarty held about her, and at what level she was playing her game, the _why_ of the situation could be nearly anything: garnered sympathy, misdirection, confusion. Deliberately constructing mindgames, just to see what Joan would do. And that was before factoring in Sherlock, who didn’t have the medical knowledge that Joan did, but nonetheless potentially knew either Joan or Moriarty well enough to deduce what they knew—or what they thought they might know—about the other’s state of mind.

Or it was possible that it really had just been an accident, and that Joan was overthinking everything. Or that it really had just been an accident, but Joan wasn’t overthinking anything because if anyone was capable of twisting a situation to suit her own purposes, it was Moriarty.

Joan was not at all surprised that she was having trouble sleeping.

Noticing that the sky outside her window looked less dark than she remembered, Joan rolled over and glanced at the clock. It was 5:47am, and so far Moriarty had stuck to her word and had left Joan alone. Whatever that meant.

Sighing heavily, Joan sat up, dragging back the covers of her bed and twisting until her feet hit the floor. It was nearly light enough to head out for a run, which, if nothing else, would give her at least an hour away from the brownstone and its plethora of intellectually superior but emotionally stunted lunatics.

The second that Moriarty was out of New York, she was going to lock her door and sleep for a week. And if Sherlock tried to stop her…

Well, she was pretty sure that most of the cops at the precinct liked her better. It probably wouldn’t be too hard to convince one of them to arrest him for a few days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (TW for potential self harm)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everybody talks to Joan, who is not a therapist, but plays one on tv.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone on the internet is so nice (is that even statistically possible?), go on with your bad selves, friends :)

In retrospect, Joan probably should have known better, she who was familiar enough with Sherlock’s bizarre texting style to have detected a fake message mere weeks after they had met, resulting in Sherlock’s rescue from his kidnapping would-be murderer.

Still, the text she had received right as she was leaving her mother’s house, her late morning visit mercifully concluded, didn’t seem particularly unusual for him. If anything, it was even more succinct than usual—an address about three blocks from the brownstone, abbreviated almost to the point of illegibility, and the simple directive ‘ _Come’_. Nothing to explain the weird, twisting paranoia that was lingering on the edge of her mind, even as she texted back an ‘ _on my way’_ and hurried down to the train platform.

_It’s probably just because we haven’t taken a real case since Moriarty showed up,_ she reasoned with herself, dutifully getting off of the train one stop early and taking a left out of the station instead of bearing right. And it was true—obviously reluctant to compromise any ongoing investigations, Captain Gregson had temporarily benched Joan and Sherlock as consultants, to be reinstated upon Moriarty’s departure. In the interim, they’d had to make do with referrals; paying cases that were excellent for their bank accounts, if generally more boring than their usual work.

Nothing they’d worked on in over a week had necessitated visiting a crime scene, and certainly not with the urgency that Sherlock’s text had implicitly indicated. If she was being summoned to an unknown location without even a hint of an explanation, then something must have changed.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The address that Sherlock had sent turned out to be an upscale café that Joan had passed by dozens of times before but had never actually eaten at—and probably never would, if they’d been called to the scene because some unfortunate employee had had their throat slit in the kitchen. Hurrying to cross the street before the light changed, Joan ducked around a woman with a jogging stroller and made a beeline for the heavy glass door, pulling it open with both arms before slipping inside.

The café was warm and tastefully decorated, with a color scheme of creams and reds that Joan approved of. Though the space was larger than she would have guessed it was, looking at it from the outside, the plush armchairs arranged around each table and the ornate fireplace on the right wall gave the café a cozy appearance that Joan immediately liked.

It was also completely devoid of Sherlock. Instead, Moriarty was seated in a neatly-upholstered armchair facing the entrance, an open bottle of red wine on the table in front of her.

Not for the first time since Moriarty had made her reappearance, Joan cursed herself for failing to follow her instincts.

Moriarty was smiling brightly, clearly having noticed that Joan had spotted her. “Joan, you made it,” she announced cheerfully, setting her glass down on the white linen tablecloth and gesturing toward the seat opposite her. “Please, do join me.”

Without pausing to reconsider, Joan obeyed. “Where’s Sherlock?” she demanded, her tone betraying nothing of the wariness she’d felt since her phone had first chimed with the text, now taking on a concrete form.

Moriarty continued to smile, as if she’d sensed it anyway. “At home, I expect,” she answered, picking up the empty glass at Joan’s place setting and pouring her a glass of wine. “He was showering when I left, but I imagine he’s out by now. Drink? It’s one of mine; several steps removed, of course.”

Joan ignored her. “You texted me from Sherlock’s phone,” she stated flatly, not asking a question so much as seeking confirmation.

She received it. “And erased the message after,” Moriarty agreed, taking a sip of wine from her own glass. “Which gives us at least half an hour before he deduces our location and comes storming in here to rescue you.” She gestured at Joan’s glass with her own. “The yelling could be spectacular; you may want to fortify yourself in preparation.”

Joan shook her head. “I’m not staying,” she informed Moriarty coolly, shifting her purse higher up on her shoulder and standing up. “Next time, text me from your own phone.”

Moriarty remained nonplussed. “You’d have ignored it,” she reproached Joan mildly. “And it’s not as if my intentions were untoward—I merely wished to thank you for your assistance the other day, and I knew that bringing anything alcoholic into the house would upset you. Sherlock’s delicate sobriety and all.”

Moriarty glanced down at her arm and, in spite of herself, Joan found her eyes doing the same. Moriarty’s sleeves were long—not unusual, given the damp October weather—and if she hadn’t known it was there, Joan might have missed the slight bulge of the protective bandage guarding her stitches underneath the fabric.

When Joan looked up, Moriarty was watching her. “You can ask, you know,” she offered gently, pulling her arm from the table and settling back into her armchair as if it were a throne. “I know you’ve wondered.”

Joan met her gaze. “It’s none of my business,” she pointed out, sitting back down and silently acknowledging that she had wondered about the incident that had resulted in Moriarty bleeding profusely on their kitchen counter.

More often than she’d care to admit, certainly. “I’m not your doctor.”

Moriarty shrugged carelessly. “No one is; I don’t currently have one,” she replied, twisting the thin stem of her wineglass between her fingers without picking it up. “But seeing as it’s your handiwork holding my arm together, I suppose you may as well enjoy proprietary rights for the moment. Ask away.”

Joan paused, then plunged ahead anyway—it was hardly as if complying with Moriarty’s request would make things any _more_ awkward. “All right,” she agreed. “Have you thought about getting some kind of psychiatric help? I know it might be impossible, finding someone discreet that you couldn’t run rings around, but even if you couldn’t tell the whole truth…”

Joan trailed off at the sight of Moriarty’s face: far from looking angry or offended, as Joan half expected, Moriarty’s eyes were glittering, as if Christmas had come early. “Not quite what I had anticipated,” she admitted, smiling dazzlingly across the table at Joan. “My dear Watson, do you mean to say that you’ve been worried about me?”

Something inside Joan snapped at the obvious condescension. “I don’t know what to feel about you,” she replied frankly, her voice cold with anger over being toyed with by Moriarty yet again. “I can’t even tell if there’s anyone _there_ half the time, underneath all the arrogance and manipulation, or if you’re actually as detached from everything and everyone as you pretend to be. How could I possibly be worried about you, when I can’t even tell which one of your elaborate smokescreens is the real you?”

At some point during Joan’s scathing commentary, Moriarty’s face had gone dangerously blank and shuttered. In contrast to Joan, whose muscles were tensed with adrenaline, Moriarty was perfectly still. Her silence swallowed up the background noise of the café, leaving a palpable tension between them, and Joan found that she couldn’t look away.

Finally, after a moment that stretched on for eons, something in Moriarty’s gaze unlocked as she looked down at the tablecloth, then back up at Joan. “I can’t change what I am, you know,” she said quietly, her voice low enough that Joan felt herself leaning forward slightly in order to catch every word. “Nor do I want to. You must know that by now.”

Joan bit the inside of her lip. “People do change, though,” she pointed out, matching the softness of Moriarty’s tone. “You and Sherlock are so alike, you’ve said, but he’s a much different person now than when I first met him.”

Moriarty scoffed, watching her fingernail as it ran idly along the white linen of the tablecloth. “I am substantially less malleable than Sherlock has ever been,” she explained, her voice curiously free of the haughtiness that the words implied, as if she were merely stating a fact. “I am far less inclined to let my actions be dictated by the whims of others.”

She looked back up at Joan, a chilly, unfathomable expression darkening her features. “You can’t understand what it’s like,” she informed Joan coolly. “You think you do because you’ve beaten me once, because you live with him.” Her eyes flashed. “I don’t _miss_ things, Joan,” she continued, leaning forward to stare at Joan hungrily, palms pressed flat to the table. “I don’t miss things, and I missed you. Sherlock slept with me for months, and never saw that I had given birth. He conversed with me for hours at a time, and never once detected that I was fabricating my accent—then and now, for the record. His blind spots are _cavernous_ , and yet he saw something in you that I, for all my superiority in every way that matters, did not. What a curious wonder you are, Joan Watson, to turn us on our own heads in the way you’ve done.”

 Joan sat quietly. Almost nothing that Moriarty had said was new information to her, but never before had she seen Moriarty so…affected by any of it. Either she was letting her veneer slip—maybe as a direct response to Joan’s accusation—or she was redoubling her bluff, and Joan sensed that how the conversation ended, and whether or not Moriarty continued with their uneasy détente, rested entirely on Joan’s reaction to it.

Joan was smart enough to choose her words carefully.

“I won’t be your game,” she said, quietly but firmly, and watched as Moriarty sat back up and paid attention. “If I feel that you’re trying to make me into one again, I will personally pack your things. There are some very good women’s shelters in the area, and we both know that any enemy you have would be far more likely to look at Sherlock and I to find you than to look there.

“Plus,” she added, “they all have metal detectors, so I’m guessing fewer people have gotten shot at or stabbed there than in the brownstone.”

Moriarty continued to watch Joan for a moment, her eyes searching Joan’s face for something.

Joan kept her expression carefully neutral.   

In the end, Moriarty nodded slowly. “Duly noted,” she allowed, a tiny smile gracing her lips.

Joan nodded back, then pressed on. “He denies it, but he still loves you,” she admitted carefully to Moriarty—who, more likely than not, was more surprised by the confession itself than by the information it contained. “Loves what you were to him once, at least. I’m not interested in making you admit that you feel the same,” she continued, a small, secret part of her warming in satisfaction as Moriarty’s eyebrow arched in shock at _that_. “I don’t need your validation. But I do need your promise that you won’t intentionally hurt him again. He doesn’t deserve that.”

For all that Joan had taken Moriarty aback, she recovered quickly, leaning forward to rest her chin on her hand; a childish gesture that made her appear impossibly younger. “I’ve had access to your house for nearly two weeks now,” she pointed out, almost petulantly, to Joan. “Don’t you think that if I had any intention of hurting Sherlock, I’d have done so by now?”

Joan remained unmoved by the protest. “That wasn’t a promise,” she countered, and watched as Moriarty smiled approvingly at her.

“Very well,” Moriarty replied lightly, sitting back up and reaching for her wineglass. “I have no plans or desire to hurt Sherlock, or you, for the duration of my stay. Should that change, I’ll be sure to give you ample enough warning, but I don’t expect that to come up—I merely wish to anticipate such a contingency so that I can be certain of my promise.”

Joan fought the urge to roll her eyes at such a bureaucratic loophole of a threat. “Good,” she said instead, with a slight nod.

Moriarty nodded back. “Good,” she echoed, glancing at the door before smiling back at Joan.

The door—Joan realized suddenly that nearly twenty minutes had passed since she had arrived. “I should go,” she said abruptly, checking the phone in her pocket for any genuine messages from Sherlock—and almost missing the flash of disappointment on Moriarty’s face as she did so.

Moriarty again recovered quickly. “If you must,” she sighed, leaning back in her armchair and checking her own phone. “I have some business to take care of in the city today; don’t expect me back before dinner.”

Joan felt a rush of nausea at the thought of Moriarty’s ‘business’ and deliberately chose not to respond, standing up and straightening her coat and purse instead.

Moriarty gazed up at her. “Are you going to tell him?” she wondered curiously, tilting her head slightly. “About our little meeting.”

Joan paused, her hands still clutching the top button of her coat.

Sherlock was sure to know that Joan was hiding something from him if she didn’t say anything, as he almost always did, or work out that she was lying if she made up something about where she’d gone after leaving her mother’s apartment. Telling the truth, however—that far from walking away once she’d realized she’d been tricked, Joan had stayed for a chat over a bottle of wine (never mind that she hadn’t had any herself)—would hardly come across any better.

Then, also, was the unpleasant realization that Moriarty was making Joan wish that she could lie to Sherlock and get away with it.

Joan brushed the thought away irritably. “I don’t know,” she answered, before turning around and heading for the door.

And if her answer was more abrupt than she had meant to make it, well. Moriarty, in her fashion, had probably already deduced why.

Joan only made it halfway to the door before Moriarty called her name, just loud enough for her to hear it. Joan considered ignoring her and going home, but sighed instead, turning back impatiently. “What?” she replied, allowing her exasperation to color her tone.

Moriarty was smiling. “You like me, you know,” she informed Joan serenely.

Joan blinked rapidly. “Excuse me?” she demanded, completely bewildered by the accusation.

Moriarty continued to smile. “You hate that you do—it kills you, after all that I’ve done, and all that you suspect that I will do. But you like me, nonetheless.”

Joan swallowed, taking a second to collect herself. When she spoke again, her voice was surprisingly even. “For Sherlock’s sake, I tolerate your presence,” she told Moriarty. “And I don’t loathe you the way that I did before you went to prison. Don’t push it.”

This time, Moriarty didn’t stop her when she walked away.

 

* * *

  


Between stopping at the pharmacy to restock on bandages and disinfectant, and running into a neighbor who had accidentally received some of Sherlock’s mail (despite having ‘just seen it two seconds ago’, it had taken the woman five minutes to find the three envelopes buried under a week’s worth of newspapers), it took Joan nearly half an hour to cover the relatively short distance between Moriarty’s café and the brownstone. When she finally did traipse up the front steps and unlock the door, she found that Moriarty had indeed gone elsewhere, leaving Sherlock home alone with his pile of cold cases—which, in Joan’s absence, had become less of a pile and more of a semicircle of manila folders spread out on the living room floor, in the middle of which sat a shirtless, meditating Sherlock, eyes closed and hands balanced delicately on his knees.

It was truly a testament to Joan’s life that that barely even registered as weird.

Sherlock didn’t bother opening his eyes at the sound of Joan’s greeting, remaining perfectly calm and still as she hung up her fall coat—she’d have to switch to a winter one, sooner rather than later—and slid her shoes off.

 

“How was your visit?” he asked instead, tilting his head to the side with an audible crack.

Joan hummed noncommittally, crossing over to the table on the far side of the room, where Clyde was perched far too close to the edge for comfort. “The usual,” she answered absently, intercepting Clyde and redirecting him toward his pile of lettuce. “She’s thinking of going to France on vacation next summer, though, so don’t be surprised when she calls you for ‘an insider’s’ recommendation on everything.”

Sherlock hummed back, not deigning to comment, even to remind Joan that he was never surprised by anything.

“And Moriarty’s ambush, how did that go?” he wondered in place of a response, his voice clipped and precise in a model of disinterest.

Joan, not even a little shocked that he had somehow worked out where she had been, saw right through his attitude. “Clearly more surprising to me than it was to you,” she noted dryly, reassuring herself that Clyde was happily resettled and munching away before sitting down in the closest chair and looking at Sherlock expectantly.

Sherlock’s ears reddened slightly. “Ah,” he offered neutrally, unfolding himself from his lotus position on the floor and climbing to his feet.

Joan raised an eyebrow, waiting.

It didn’t take long. “I...may have kept an eye on your meeting,” Sherlock admitted uncomfortably after a moment, his posture stiffer than usual as he avoided looking at Joan. “There’s a bodega owner on the same block who lives above his shop, and who was once erroneously accused of attempting to poison his wife with a rare plant from their window box of exotic flora. I was able to prove that the culprit was, in fact, the head chef at a nearby pizzeria—now shut down, of course. The exonerated bodega owner, in return, often allows me the use of his living room and amateur astronomy equipment without the requisite unnecessary questions.”

Joan took a second to parse through the detailed explanation.

“You know a guy who lets you spy on people with his telescope, and doesn’t find it offputtingly creepy,” she summarized flatly, crossing her legs and sitting back in her chair.

Sherlock waved impatiently. “Incorrect in part—he finds it very ‘creepy’, but gratitude for my assistance allows him to ignore it without difficulty—but otherwise admirably succinct.”

When Joan didn’t respond, he squirmed guiltily. “I assure you, I had no intention of violating your sense of privacy or spying on you without your knowledge,” he offered, swinging his arms hesitantly. “I was merely concerned when Moriarty went to some lengths to secure your company alone and under false pretenses—although clearly not enough, since she was only partially successful—and only followed her to ensure your continued wellbeing.”

Joan, who wasn’t actually offended, but as a rule considered it a public service to encourage Sherlock’s occasional displays of humility or recognition of his too-eager willingness to overstep boundaries, kept her face blank. “You thought she was going to kidnap me?”

Sherlock looked at her seriously in response. “She had a minion point a gun at you in order to secure your cooperation in the past,” he reminded her soberly. “I wouldn’t expect her to repeat herself, but I would be remiss in ignoring what she is, and what she is capable of.”

At Joan’s compassionate expression, Sherlock turned away. “In any case,” he added, “I was prepared to step in, had you indicated in any way that your safety had been compromised, but you seemed to be handling the situation in such a way that did not necessitate my interference.”

It was not a rebuke, but a veiled inquiry, and Joan nodded, her mouth suddenly dry. “No, it was…fine,” she assured him, staring past him unseeingly at the window as she thought about her conversation with Moriarty, barely an hour before. “Unsettling, maybe, but not unsafe.”

It was Sherlock’s turn to be silent, and Joan let the quiet between them stretch for a minute before asking the question that had been in the back of her mind since Moriarty’s arrival. “Does it…” she began, pausing briefly before pressing on, “is it hard? Having her here, I mean. After everything.”

Sherlock froze for half a second, before stretching his shoulders carelessly. “It’s hardly the worst situation that I could be in,” he allowed, more lightly than the answer warranted. “Think of it: we could be living with the late Sebastian Moran right now, had he turned out to be my arch nemesis.”

Joan made a face at the thought, and Sherlock’s lips quirked into a smile.

Picking up the again-wayward Clyde, Sherlock tucked him gently into the crook of his arm. “You needn’t be concerned about me, Watson,” he told her, still cavalier, but with a look on his face that told Joan that he was attempting to be sincere. “I am not so foolish as to believe that Moriarty will ever cease to be…significant, in some manner. But she doesn’t hold the same power over me that she once did. I can survive—and indeed, thrive—without her.”

He smiled faintly at Joan, before looking back down at Clyde. “Quite frankly, I have more in my life now than I did when I suffered the initial loss of Irene. If she wished to break me again, I rather suspect she’d have to try significantly harder this time around.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

For what felt like the 10,000th time since she’d moved in, Sherlock woke Joan up in the middle of the night. And, for what felt like around the 4,000th time, Joan was fairly certain that it was unintentional—unless her sleep-fogged imagination was wrong, and he was actually shouting at _her_ in Burmese instead of the unlucky person on the other end of the phone line.

She shifted slightly to glance at the clock, not bothering to stifle her groan when she saw that it was well past 3am—far beyond being the middle of the night, it was practically a brand new day.

The thought gave Joan pause. A new day meant that it had been two weeks exactly since Moriarty’s arrival on their doorstep, requesting sanctuary for a time period that everyone down to the NYPD had agreed would be significantly shorter than that.

So how was it that, when she and Sherlock had been discussing Moriarty and her presence in their lives just that afternoon, her leaving had never come up in the conversation?


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twelve hours in three acts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My 'a' key is spazzing out and work emergencies abound, so it's time to experiment with style a little bit :) Apologies for the length of time it took, but some pieces were trickier than others (though I think/hope it all came together in the end).
> 
> You're all the coolest, and those among you who get squeamish reading about bodily functions should probably check the chapter notes at the bottom before reading section II.

_I._ _Sherlock._

 

The setting was, in itself, not noticeably different than many another evening in the brownstone. Sherlock was ensconced in his armchair, staring at the various papers and newsprint and red yarn tacked up on the evidence board above the fireplace, the light sound of a pen skimming across a sheaf of paper at Watson’s preferred worktable humming placidly in the back of his mind.

Only two fairly important details altered the tableau, making the scene somewhat more unusual. The first was that, rather than Watson, it was Moriarty who was scratching away in her notebook across the room, sharing his domestic sphere.

The second was a direct result of the first: every piece of ‘evidence’ that Sherlock had been staring at for upward of three hours was, in fact, a blank sheet of paper, appropriately sized and placed in a relevant location.

The crime itself was fairly pedestrian—sixty million dollars gone suddenly missing from a high profile insurance outfit, board of directors petrified of public relations fallout, etc., etc. Sherlock had bet that the case which forced Captain Gregson to reconsider his stance on his and Watson’s participation in the NYPD’s investigations would be a more urgent matter—an unsolved kidnapping, a serial murderer, an imminent bomb threat. He’d failed to take into account his own reputation, grown notorious in the Financial District for his successes, and the possibility of the company contacts begging for his personal involvement.

Bit of a stupid oversight on his part, really, but a forgivable one.

The tangible case files were in situ at the precinct, a condition placed on his involvement by Captain Gregson. “We’re walking a fine enough line letting you work on the case at all, with that woman living in your house,” he’d explained gravely, clearly displeased at being persuaded to override his own sound judgment. “As it is, the first thing a good defense attorney is going to argue is that your… _situation_ may have compromised the investigation.”

Because Sherlock actually agreed with Captain Gregson’s assessment, annoying as it may have been, he settled for a dramatic rolling of the eyes and a single pithy comment deriding the American justice system before acquiescing. The work remained the same, regardless—years of honing his ability to observe meant that Sherlock could work just as easily, if admittedly at a somewhat slower pace, without needing the information placed directly under his nose.

Unlike some people—Watson—who were no longer responding to his text messages the very few times—five—it would have sped along the process immensely to have one little fact checked in the case file.

“I was at the precinct until 5:30, like I said I’d be,” she’d chided him rather unreasonably, when he’d texted her to confirm that the singular secretary who’d had access to his boss’s calendar password resided on Park _Street_ and not Park _Avenue_ , only to hear her phone chiming on the front steps as she fished through her purse for her keys.  “Now I am going out to dinner, also like I said I’d be doing. You can manage on your own for three hours. And before you ask, ‘everyone at the precinct keeps hanging up when I call’ isn’t an emergency; it’s a sign that maybe you should work on your interpersonal skills.”

Sherlock hadn’t argued the point. Not because Watson was in any way correct, but because he’d borrowed her laptop while she’d been in the shower that morning, and had cracked the latest password on her dating website. After vetting her dinner date for the evening, Sherlock was confident in anticipating Watson’s arrival back home about an hour earlier than she’d suggested.

(The man had a boring career, an only mildly handsome face, and a narcissistic streak a mile wide—too many ‘I’ statements in his profile. Watson would endure the meal out of an ingrained sense of politeness, but wouldn’t stay to linger over coffee or a nightcap.)

There was a time in the past when Sherlock would have felt obligated to point out his analysis in advance, in order to save Watson two hours that could have been spent in a more enjoyable and productive manner than on a mediocre date with an insipid bore. Trial and repeated error, however, had resigned him to silence.

“That’s the fifth sigh you’ve let out in as many minutes,” Moriarty observed in a disinterested tone, not bothering to look up from her writing. “Having trouble with the investigation, or are you merely brooding?”

Sherlock frowned.

Apparently not silent enough.

“I am not _brooding_ ,” he corrected, somewhat more moodily than he intended. “I am expressing my frustration in an audible manner in order to work it out of my system and deny it the continued ability to serve as a distraction.”

“Right,” Moriarty replied dryly. “How could I have confused the two?”

 Sherlock didn’t respond, choosing to ignore the rhetorical question in favor of his rhetorical work.

A minute later, however, he sighed without thinking about it, and Moriarty put down her pen. “It’s clearly not the case that has you this high strung,” she observed, looking at Sherlock appraisingly. “Tell me, is it Joan being gone, or Joan being gone on a _date,_ that you find more distasteful?”

Sherlock shot her an ugly look, but saw no need to lie to the one person who understood his feelings on the matter better than anyone else. “You already know the answer to that,” he pointed out. “I have no issue with Watson seeking social connections outside of our work together—given how often she’s made use of them to further our investigations, objecting to it would be hypocritical of me. Rather, I abhor the manner in which she goes about it—unsuccessful dates with unforgivably banal men she meets on the internet—and the amount of cognitive dissonance she spends maintaining the fantasy that she enjoys dating when, in fact, she treats her social outings like a chore that must be endured.”

Moriarty nodded sagely. “Would that be the explanation behind the drawer full of flyers for literary clubs and male callboys, then?” she asked, in a far more matter-of-fact tone than Watson herself (and Ms. Hudson, and Alfredo) had.

Sherlock pursed his lips. “Her curiosity will win out someday,” he insisted archly. “Until then, we endure.”

Moriarty looked at him pityingly. “You know you don’t actually believe that, Sherlock,” she replied, at least doing Sherlock the courtesy of looking back down at her notebook after attempting to burst his bubble, as it were. “Extraordinary as Watson is, she’s not wired like you and I, who only need other people to alleviate the boredom.”

She paused. “But if it’s any consolation, I suspect Joan will be home rather a bit sooner than she predicted,” she added. “Her date seems far too dull and self-important to hold her interest much longer than it will take the pair of them to order dinner.”

Sherlock frowned at Moriarty, who rolled her eyes contemptuously. “Spare me your indignation on her behalf,” she requested, her tone colored with fond exasperation. “We both know you’ve done the same.”

Sherlock sat up straighter. “Of course I did,” he acknowledged shamelessly. “But as her partner, I’ve earned the right to parse through her things; you have not.”

Moriarty raised an eyebrow. “I think you’ll find Joan in disagreement on that front,” she pointed out.

Sherlock scowled back, caught. “Watson is resigned to my habitual borrowing of her things without asking,” he corrected grudgingly. “Still, she’d undoubtedly be upset to learn that you’ve done the same. Again, I might add.”

Moriarty smiled innocently—though why she bothered when neither she nor Sherlock were even remotely fooled was anyone’s guess. “I was merely concerned for Joan’s safety, and wanted to investigate her companion in advance,” she explained.

Sherlock eyed her skeptically.

Moriarty shrugged gracefully. “Murderers get lonely, too, I’m told,” she pointed out.

There wasn’t a great deal Sherlock could say to that.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

  _II._ _Joan._

 

After two years of living in the brownstone, being woken up at all hours of the night was hardly an unusual occurrence for Joan. Usually, though, Sherlock was the one to blame, someone she could focus her annoyance on and mutter breathless obscenities at as she pulled herself out of bed to face whatever latest development it was that had captured his attention.

This time, it was her own body that had forced her, unwanted, into consciousness—a tearing, powerful spasm spreading through her abdomen, and an instinctive awareness that she had only seconds to make it down the hall.

She did make it, but only just, her knees slamming into the tiled floor of the bathroom with a painful, audible crack as she threw up over and over, stomach churning and sweat pouring down her face, hands gripping the porcelain weakly.

 

* * *

 

 

After what seemed like an eternity, and more puking than should have been possible, the pressure in Joan’s chest eased slightly. She paused, resting her forehead heavily on her hand and panting with exertion. The tiles were cool under her bare shins, but even though she wanted nothing more than to curl up on the floor until the dizzying, almost violent queasiness passed, she remained still, afraid to move and trigger a second round of vomiting.

“Oh dear, look at you.”

Joan didn’t look up at the sound of her voice, too exhausted to pretend that she was anything but miserably ill.

_Ill._ The horrific, clenching waves began again and Joan lurched forward, feeling nauseated and hollow as she threw up bile and acid, everything else in her stomach having long been expelled.

Focused on staying upright, Joan didn’t notice Moriarty coming into the room—or anything outside of her own wretched body, really—until she felt a cool touch to her forehead, followed by the sensation of fingers threading through her hair, lifting it away from her sweat-soaked face and carding it clumsily but gently into a messy ponytail. The small part of Joan’s brain that continued to function despite everything wondered abstractly that someone whose hair always looked perfect no matter what would feel so uncertain when forced to cope with someone else’s.

Then her stomach lurched again, and Joan thought of nothing at all.

 

* * *

 

 

Time passed in a haphazard fashion. Joan clung to consciousness as best she could, knowing even without her medical degree that passing out while still vomiting would end dangerously. Still, everything around her was hazy, and it wasn’t until several minutes after hearing snippets of their conversation—

_“…would typically ask Watson…”_

_“…getting her to a doctor, or…”_

_“…fluid loss…”_

_“…attempt to take her temperature, but I think…”_

_“…something with electrolytes, at least…”_

_“…will call if anything…”_

—that Joan even realized that Sherlock had been upstairs at all. “Sherlock?” she coughed weakly, another wave of nausea passing over her that thankfully resulted in nothing.

Cool, gentle hands stroked her back hesitantly, as if unsure of their welcome or unused to the motion. “Gone to the bodega to fetch supplies,” Moriarty explained. “We thought it best to try and rehydrate you here before attempting to move you to a hospital.”

Joan hummed her agreement—movement sounded like a terrible idea. The vibration in her throat, however, triggered another round of coughing, and Moriarty’s hands moved to grip her shoulders and hold her in place until it was over. “Let me get you some water to rinse your mouth out with,” she suggested and, taking Joan’s lack of reaction for the assent that it was, filled a disposable cup with tap water and helped Joan hold it to her mouth as she swirled mouthfuls of water around and spat them back out.

“Better?” Moriarty asked when she had finished, and this time Joan was able to give her a tiny nod without instantly regretting it.

“Thank you,” she breathed tiredly, closing her eyes.

Then: “I smell paint.”

Moriarty let go of Joan’s shoulder. “I was moving my canvases, before you were taken ill,” she explained, moving back from Joan until she was sitting against the wall a few feet away.

It felt like a loss, but one Joan wasn’t sure she regretted.

“Does the scent bother you?” Moriarty was asking. “I can fulfill my promise to keep you alive until Sherlock gets back from the hallway, if it’s making you feel worse.”

Joan shook her head minutely. “No, it’s good,” she assured Moriarty without finesse, too wrung out and tired to explain that the clinical, almost medicinal scent was neutral and grounding in a way that not much else was. “Stay, please.”

Moriarty didn’t respond. After a minute, though, Joan felt her shifting on the floor behind her. “Is there…” she began, before switching tactics. “What would help you, right now? I haven’t had food poisoning since I was a child and Sherlock is something of an idiot with regard to human care, so I’m afraid we’re both rather at a loss.”

Joan leaned her cheek onto the back of her hand, her face tacky with drying sweat. She swallowed weakly. “Just…keep talking?” she asked, her voice small and meek in a way that would have irritated her if she hadn’t felt half dead. “It’s distracting; it’s good.”

If Moriarty thought any less of Joan for the childishness of the entreaty, she was tactful enough to let it go for the moment. “All right,” she began slowly. “Any requests? Even if I’m certain you won’t remember a shred of this in the morning, I know how opinionated you are.”

Joan stifled a groan, leaning heavily on her arm as she tucked her legs more closely underneath her body. “I don’t care,” she muttered honestly, closing her eyes. “Nothing that would get you arrested, I guess.”

Even without seeing Moriarty, Joan could feel her amusement. “That does rather limit my options,” Moriarty acknowledged. She paused for a minute, and Joan could hear her shifting again, stretching out into a more comfortable position against the wall.

“Have you ever been to Barcelona?” she asked Joan, who shook her head, cracking her eyes open. Moriarty was smiling beatifically. “It’s a beautiful city,” she told Joan. “I was very young the first time I visited. I knew, of course, the direction that my life would take at that point, but I was still in the planning stages of my career—still exploring the world, honing my talents. Barcelona, though, was different; all of my plans and expectations were…less important, somehow, when I was there. So much art, Joan; art and architecture everywhere. And the ocean. I don’t romanticize nature, Joan, it’s not who I am. The view from my rooms, though, was one that I knew even before the more extensive of my travels was uniquely breathtaking. There was one evening in late spring that I remember spending in a cantina by the water…”

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t until Joan stirred awake, cradled in Sherlock’s arms as he carried her back to her room, that she even realized that she had fallen asleep, drifting off as Moriarty spun tales of the Mediterranean coast.

It shouldn’t have been comforting. Moriarty was who she was, and Joan didn’t hold out hope that she could change.

But it was.

Sherlock’s heartbeat thrumming soft and steady in her ear; the low murmur of Moriarty’s voice in the hallway in front of them.

Joan let herself be lulled back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

 

_III._ _Jamie._

 

It was well after dawn when Joan began to stir. Jamie was utterly unsurprised by this—when left to her own devices, Joan would unplug her alarm clock and sleep through half the morning nine times out of ten. Knowing Sherlock’s habits as she did, Jamie couldn’t blame her, though the absolute desperation with which Joan clung to unconsciousness spoke of a sleep deprivation that predated their association, and perhaps even medical school. Childhood insomnia; night terrors? She’d have to float the suggestion, read Joan’s reaction.

Jamie watched as a shadow flitted over Joan’s face, and then smoothed back out. She was paler than usual, and her hair was still in the same mussed ponytail that Jamie had haphazardly scraped it into the night before. Jamie wasn’t petty—Joan’s usual beauty was dulled by her illness, but she looked far better than Jamie herself would have, had their situations been reversed.

It really was a shame that Joan would most certainly refuse to let Jamie paint her as she was. Not that Jamie wouldn’t do it anyway, but she’d have to be _secretive_ about it, which was rather more bothersome when living with two people whose hackles would be immediately raised by her shutting herself behind a locked door.

She couldn’t blame them for it, really, but still.

“You weren’t there all night, were you?”

Jamie blinked. Sometime during her brown study, Joan had woken up enough to notice Jamie in her armchair, though apparently not enough to bother sitting up.

Jamie smiled at her—she really did sound much better, if a little hoarse. “I was not,” she confirmed. “Sherlock was here until receiving a somewhat time sensitive phone call, about half an hour ago. I agreed to take his place, and to see to it that you had whatever you needed when you woke.”

Joan nodded drowsily, seemingly satisfied by the explanation, or at least tired enough not to question it. “I feel like I got hit by a truck, but I think I’m done being sick,” she replied, stretching slowly and lazily before pushing herself up into a seated position against the wall. “Pretty sure it was food poisoning—the clams I had at dinner last night tasted a little strange, but I figured it was just a different kind of sauce that I wasn’t used to.”

Jamie could read between the lines easily enough—Joan had known that the dish wasn’t quite right, but had eaten it anyway to avoid causing any awkwardness on her date. Of course she had.

Jamie, who had witnessed Joan rejecting a handful of plates or drinks over the previous three weeks, wasn’t sure whether to feel annoyed that she didn’t merit the same common politeness from Joan that she apparently showed to strangers, or pleased that Joan felt content enough to drop the veneer in front of her.

She settled for ignoring ‘feelings’ entirely for the moment; they were dull, anyhow. “My dear Joan, we simply must work on your self-preservation instinct,” she lamented facetiously instead.

Joan made a face at that. “Don’t let Sherlock hear you say that,” she warned. “He’ll start throwing things at my head again, and try to pass it off as ‘awareness training’.”

Jamie’s interest must have shown on her face, because Joan shot her a dark look. “Don’t even try it,” she insisted.

Jamie’s smile grew. “I make few promises,” she reminded Joan, who scowled in return. “In any case, now that you’re awake, are you hungry? There was a pastry special at the café this morning, so we’ve a tray of beignets in the kitchen.”

Joan perked up at that. “Starving,” she confirmed, taking her hair down from Jamie’s messy updo and retying it neatly. “I’d better start off with something blander, just in case, but that sounds fantastic.”

Joan looked so pleased by the thought of breakfast that Jamie magnanimously forewent the obvious remark that trusting _more_ restaurant cuisine when still recovering from the previous dose was entirely idiotic and far too trusting. Besides offending Joan, as it likely would, it was possible that such commentary would convince her to skip the beignets entirely. And it would be a shame to waste them—it had taken one favor, two veiled threats (half a dozen points of contact removed, of course), and a conveniently diverted shipment of organic eggs to ‘convince’ the appropriate midtown bakery that they really did wish to open two hours early to craft Jamie’s order from scratch.

Not that Jamie had any intention of ever telling Joan that, of course.

“Oh, where did these come from?”

Now out of bed and halfway into her robe, Joan had spotted the vase of flowers on the windowsill, and the look on her face was one of open pleasure. “They’re beautiful; I didn’t know you could get sunflowers _anywhere_ in New York this far out of season.”

Jamie smiled sweetly. “Neither did I,” she replied lightly. “And yet, here we are.”

Or that, either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Squick alert for the squeamish--section II contains a fairly lengthy description of illness induced vomiting. Here thar be warning.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Joan spends a lot of time staring at a door and thinking difficult thoughts, only to have the tables turned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter is long, hard chapter was hard--I had some trouble with this one because it felt disjointed and surreal while I was writing it, but given the subject matter, it ended up feeling like the appropriate tone in the end. I just wish I had seen Clyde's turtle cozies before I wrote this; I would have found a way to make them happen :)

* * *

 

Moriarty was a criminal. More specifically, she was the murderous creator of an international criminal empire, one with a reputation for having no reputation: no evidence, no witnesses, nothing that could be traced back to anyone in its employ. Joan knew this, and better than most—the mind games that Moriarty had played with Sherlock, both in London and in New York, were not the kind that were easily forgotten. Or forgiven.

Still, it was difficult to reconcile _that_ Moriarty, the genius, ruthless mastermind who had nearly broken Sherlock irreparably, with Jamie Moriarty, the woman wearing the college hoodie that Joan had left lying on the couch the week before (irritating, yes, but Joan bit her tongue and picked her battles; at least it was better than the time she’d walked in on Sherlock using a pair of her tights as a makeshift coffee filter), and who was holding a ladder steady for Sherlock as he added a stack of books to the collection on the top shelf.

Or, at least, that’s what Joan had assumed that Sherlock was doing when she walked in the front door to find them there.

Sherlock, it seemed, had other ideas.

“You realize that this would be an immeasurably quicker process if you actually bothered to _shelve_ the books, rather than simply stand there flipping through them,” Moriarty criticized, her patience clearly dwindling rapidly.

Sherlock barely spared her a glance. “By all means, go elsewhere,” he suggested, wriggling slightly at the top of the ladder as he dramatically turned a page in the gigantic tome he was clutching. “Far be it from me to _bore_ you with my scientific curiosity.”

Moriarty sighed witheringly. “You’d have broken your neck by now without someone to steady you,” she pointed out, “and pardon me if I’d prefer not to go back to prison when your dead body turns up after we were left alone for two hours.”

Sherlock straightened back up. “Watson’s home now,” he noted, gesturing at Joan in the doorway so emphatically that he nearly dropped the book he was holding on Moriarty’s head in the process. “She’d corroborate your alibi, if only to avoid lying to the police.”

Moriarty looked over her shoulder at Joan, eyebrow raised questioningly.

Joan, who was frankly surprised that either of them had noticed her at all over the sound of their petty bickering, merely shrugged. “I don’t know; it could be a case of taking care of two birds with one stone,” she mused, barely resisting rolling her eyes when both Sherlock and Moriarty glared at her in response.

God, it was like living with a pair of teenagers. British ones, one of whom occasionally murdered people.

Sighing, Joan headed up the stairs to her room, leaving Sherlock and Moriarty to deal with each other.

It was probably time to give her therapist another call.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Despite Captain Gregson’s reservations, the insurance company embezzlement case was not a one-time allowance: Joan and Sherlock were once again consulting for the NYPD.

Joan was mostly happy about it—the cases the police called them in for were more interesting, by far, than any of the paying cases they’d taken on in their absence—but the extra money had been nice, and both it and the abundance of time they’d suddenly had had freed them up to consult for other clients who couldn’t necessarily turn to the police: immigrants afraid of losing their green cards or work visas, if they had them; a battered woman who’d been nearly as afraid of her ex-cop father-in-law as she’d been of her husband; a group of tenants whose landlord had been illegally cutting corners in their building, but couldn’t afford to be evicted for speaking up.

There were restrictions attached to their return, of course: case files and evidence boards, once commonplace in the brownstone, were temporarily limited to the precinct itself. Bug sweeps were conducted by either Joan or Sherlock every eight hours in all of the main rooms, as well as a daily random sweep conducted at Sherlock’s discretion (“I’ve planted enough listening devices to develop a sort of ‘sixth sense’ for their presence, as it were,” he’d sniffed, when Joan had caught him climbing the kitchen counters at five in the morning. “Perhaps if you are very thorough and consistent in your training, you will achieve the same.”). Even then, any discussions even remotely related to an investigation had to be done under the cover of Sherlock’s record player, just in case.

Joan could—and did—blame Moriarty for all of the new strings and contingencies attached to their previously (relatively) unburdened work with the police. Ironically, however, Moriarty was also probably the biggest reason that they were being allowed to return in the first place. Marcus still wouldn’t tell Joan exactly what Moriarty had said to him when she’d intercepted his call to Joan’s cell phone—an occurrence that had only become possible because Joan had been sleeping off a mild case of post-date food poisoning and hadn’t exactly been keeping track of her electronics—but the results had spoken for themselves.

“Let’s just say that Moriarty isn’t the only criminal in the city, and she’s right that having you two benched makes all the wrong people’s jobs just that much easier,” he’d admitted, when pressed. “If nothing else, she’ll have to be a lot more careful not to get caught, with the pair of you back in business. Which will hopefully translate to fewer dead bodies, right?”

Joan had conceded the point, even as she’d remained skeptical of his assessment of Moriarty—in her eyes, being more careful could very well mean leaving fewer potential witnesses alive.

Still, what he’d said was true: the majority of the crime in New York City was unrelated to Moriarty, and Sherlock and Joan had proven several times over that they were strong assets to the department, ones with a noticeable effect on its solve rate. And despite the added complications (or more likely, knowing Sherlock, in stubborn response to their new constraints), the week had been a good one—Sherlock had wrapped up the insurance case by the time Joan had gotten back on her feet after being sick, and another three cases followed in quick succession, culminating in a dramatic arrest outside a high-security bank vault just before midnight on Friday.

When Joan woke up the next morning, frost patterns swirled on the windows of her room and the house peaceful and silent—Sherlock had been up for 47 hours straight and had resorted to mainlining pixie sticks by the end of it, and probably wouldn’t wake up until late that night—it was with an idle, almost familiar feeling of contentment; an inexplicable but comforting sensation that, despite all the recent major and minor disturbances in their lives and routines, everything was starting to get back into balance. Smiling, Joan rolled over and went back to sleep for a little bit longer.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The peace and normality lasted until around noon, before blowing up in a spectacular fashion.

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the spring, summer, and fall, the farmer’s market that Joan liked the best was open on Saturdays and Sundays until midafternoon. Between its minimalist schedule, the often erratic work hours that Joan and Sherlock put into solving cases, and the occasional awful weather that kept Joan indoors, Joan was lucky if she made it there every other week. Still, she went often enough that she had a familiar routine: run the nearly two miles to the market (taking a longer route, if the weather was nice and nothing pressing was happening with a case), unpin the folded canvas bags from inside her pocket, and make the rounds through the crowded inner buildings and colorful, freestanding tents. Generally, Joan would buy whatever they needed from whoever had the freshest looking produce, but there were tables she made a point of visiting each time—the bakery table in the middle of the third row of tents, for one, run by an Amish family with seven children and who made coarse but incredible cinnamon scones that glistened with sugar and fit perfectly in the palm of Joan’s hand. There was Molly, as well; a gray-haired woman twenty years Joan’s senior who ran a dairy farm thirty miles north of the city and who sold fresh milk in heavy glass bottles that never broke, no matter how many times Sherlock dropped them in a fit of pique. Joan often took her time meandering through the stalls before, bags and stomach full, walking the three blocks to the closest subway stop and taking the train back home.

 

The Saturday after the bank theft case wasn’t any different than usual at first, except in one seemingly insignificant way: having looked at the weather forecast on her laptop after waking up the second time, and wanting to be safely back home before the ice storm that was being predicted for the early afternoon struck, Joan left the brownstone over an hour earlier than she would have otherwise, and headed straight to the market without trying to extend her mileage.

Despite a longer than usual wait on the platform for the train home to arrive, the weather was still clear when Joan exited the station, arms taut with the weight of her bags. Her relief lasted until she made the final turn onto their street, half a block away from the brownstone.

Then she looked up, and it shattered:

The front door to the brownstone was wide open.

Instinctively, Joan veered off of the sidewalk and ducked out of sight, hiding behind the front steps of a neighboring building and quickly shoving her grocery bags into the hollow space beneath them, freeing her hands.

Even before moving in with Sherlock, Joan had been a typical safety-conscious New Yorker, with multiple locks on the doors of every apartment she’d lived in since she was a child. After Sherlock, whose paranoia regarding home security was practically something out of a spy novel, she’d only become more cautious—particularly after the number of break-ins and bullet holes in the house continued to increase every season.

For anyone else in the city, an open door meant a potential home invasion. For Joan and Sherlock, it meant a potential assassination attempt.

Taking slow, deep breaths, Joan fought the undercurrent of panic that was threatening to overtake her, deliberately keeping her eyes open and scanning the area (and cursing herself for leaving her cell phone plugged uselessly into the charger in her room). Sherlock and Moriarty had both been deeply asleep when she’d left the brownstone, but it had been over two hours—it was entirely possible that Sherlock was awake and, in a fit of emotion or out of sheer distraction, had forgotten to close the door behind him on his way in or out.

 _Right,_ the traitorous, logical part of Joan’s brain added. _Because it’s not as if he’s all that detail-oriented. And by the way, it’s thirty degrees out._

As much as she didn’t want to, Joan had to admit that the possibility was too slim to count on. If the door was wide open, it was because Sherlock was unable to get to it himself, and Moriarty—

Joan swallowed, heart hammering in her throat.

Moriarty often went out in the mornings, and it was reasonably likely that she wasn’t home or even aware of the situation, whatever it was. It was, however, equally likely that whatever had happened—or was currently happening—to Sherlock, Moriarty had been the one to orchestrate it.

Joan swallowed again, blinking rapidly. She had few illusions about Moriarty, despite their relatively peaceful cohabitation in which she’d seen less of Moriarty’s sociopathy and more…almost normal moments from her than ever before. Moriarty was a killer—a ruthless one—and a virtuoso at her craft. Joan knew without asking that she’d already resumed parts of her previous lifestyle, despite the lengths she went to to avoid doing business around Joan or Sherlock, and was likely well on her way to completely rebuilding her network of spies and secrets and murderers for hire.

But she’d also promised Joan a warning, if she ever changed her mind about hurting her or Sherlock. And maybe Joan was stupid to trust her word when common sense said that Moriarty was the most likely suspect when Sherlock was in danger, but deep in her gut, Joan didn’t believe that Moriarty had lied about that.

Joan glanced back at the brownstone again, childishly hoping that everything would be back to normal at a second look.

It wasn’t.

Joan sighed quietly. _Right._

The smart thing to do—what Sherlock would have insisted she do, after he finished berating her for not bringing a phone with her—would be to get away from the compromised brownstone as quickly as she could and call the police. Captain Gregson may have reluctantly pulled the unmarked car from their street once Joan and Sherlock had begun consulting for the department again, but Joan knew that he’d move heaven and earth (and more importantly, New York City traffic) to send help if she called.

She also knew, beyond a doubt, that Sherlock would have gone racing into the house without a second thought already if he’d thought that she was in trouble. And if both Sherlock and Moriarty had somehow been incapacitated—the worst-case scenario, and consequently the one she had to act on—they might not have time for Joan to track down a phone and call for help. Or, if they did, the first sign of the police approaching might be the thing that made their captors start shooting.

 

 _You can always run, if you have to,_ Joan thought shakily, steeling herself to act in a way that felt both morally right and intellectually counterintuitive. _If there’s nothing you can do, you can still run._

The brownstone steps that Joan had taken shelter behind belonged to the Hendersons, who, conveniently for Joan, had three kids in junior high and a cache of ratty sporting equipment tucked under the stairs where Joan had stashed her groceries. Taking one of the metal baseball bats and a final, steadying breath, Joan sprang into action, quickly darting across the street with her eyes continuously sweeping around her, the way she’d been trained. _Please, let it be a stupid mistake,_ she thought desperately, sneaking from blind spot to blind spot, hurrying to the brownstone in an approach that minimized the chances of her being spotted from the front windows. _Please let him have blown something up in the living room again, or confiscated the door hinges for an experiment. Let it be another test, even, as long as everything’s okay._

Carefully and silently, and with the bat hoisted into position on her shoulder, Joan crept up the front steps and paused on the right side of the open doorway, keeping her shadow at her back to avoid alerting anyone who might be lurking in the foyer to her presence.

It was clear a few seconds later, however, that Joan’s cautious approach had probably been unnecessary—Sherlock was very obviously alive, and shouting so loudly that Joan likely could have run up the front steps in tap shoes and still have gone unnoticed.

“Perhaps you didn’t comprehend me the first time, _Captain,”_ Sherlock was yelling—and at that Joan lowered the bat, relief flooding through her so quickly that she began shaking violently, because nothing could be too critically wrong if Sherlock’s lungs were working that well and Captain Gregson was involved—“but Watson’s safety is my _sole_ priority at the moment, and if you cannot or will not get me what I need in a timely fashion, which is to say _now,_ then I demand the names and telephone numbers of every officer currently dispatched to the scene because I promise you, I _will make one of them crack._ ”

Stunned, and more than a little confused, Joan stepped into the brownstone, all attempts at stealth forgotten.

Sherlock, as Joan would have anticipated if she’d actively thought about it, was on the phone, gripping it so tightly in his hand that his knuckles had gone white. His free hand was fisted on his temple—a gesture that Joan had only ever seen at his most agitated—and while his spine and the muscles surrounding it were painfully stiff-looking, the destruction that surrounded him—overturned houseplants, broken coffee mugs shattered on the floor, a pile of books and papers swept haphazardly off the table—suggested that the rigid control he was exhibiting had been late in coming.

If Joan hadn’t known him so well, she might have been afraid of him instead of for him. “Sherlock?” she asked quietly, trying to get his attention but not wanting to startle him.

She was only partly successful—Sherlock whipped around, dropping the phone with a resounding _thunk_ in the process.

Their eyes met, but neither of them moved.

Before Joan could think of anything to do or say that might diffuse the situation—though what it was that she was trying to diffuse, exactly, was still unclear—she heard quick footsteps coming from the hall, and Moriarty’s voice calling out to Sherlock.

“I’ve called every hospital in a three-mile radius, plus all the trauma centers in the area—she’s not a match for any of the unknown patients, and my man on the ground says—“

She stopped abruptly as she reached the doorway, eyes widening for a fraction of a second as she spotted Joan standing in the foyer.

Almost as quickly as it had come, however, the surprise on Moriarty’s face was gone, and the smile she melted into had a distinct quality of relief to it. “Joan, you’ve made it back,” she sighed, raking a hand through her disheveled hair and settling it back into place. “I suppose this means we can call off the cavalry, then.”

Watson looked at her questioningly, even more confused than before.

Hearing Joan’s name had clearly knocked Sherlock out of his trance—he had unfrozen abruptly, and was across the room in seconds. “Watson,” he attempted, voice hoarse from yelling, his hands opening and closing around nothing while the rest of him practically vibrated with nerves. “Watson, I…”

He looked on the verge of collapsing, and Joan dropped her borrowed bat on the ground with a metallic _clang_ in order to drag him over to the closest chair and force him into it.

Before she could pull away Sherlock’s hands shot forward, gripping her forearms tightly enough to bruise, as if he were afraid she’d disappear otherwise.

It was that, more than anything, that started to scare Joan again—for all that she and Sherlock spent more time together than apart, essentially living out of each other’s pockets during especially long investigations, theirs was not a relationship of casual or affectionate touches. They held doors for each other, pulled and pushed each other across rooms or crime scenes, threw things at each other in order to make a point. Sherlock pulled out chairs for her and helped her into coats with all the effortless formality of someone who’d grown up surrounded by etiquette, but had virtually never hugged her or taken her hand or, like now, clung to her arms like the stabilizing contact was the only thing grounding him, keeping him from shaking out of his skin.

Joan looked back and forth between him and Moriarty, both of whom were still staring at her intently.

She swallowed.

“Okay,” she tried, her voice almost as hoarse as Sherlock’s. “Will someone tell me what the hell is going on, please?”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

In the end, it was Moriarty who told Joan everything: not long after Joan had left the market, probably before she’d even gotten through the turnstile at the subway, one of the buildings crowded with vendors and shoppers had collapsed, killing at least seven people and seriously injuring dozens more. Ambulances and police cars had swarmed the scene, but the lurid news reports that had begun broadcasting within fifteen minutes of the incident hitting Sherlock’s police scanner were quick to report that an unknown number of victims were still trapped in the rubble, only partially accessible to the paramedics.

“It was the right time for you to be in precisely the wrong location,” Moriarty added, watching Joan soberly. “You weren’t answering your phone, and the longer you went without getting in touch…”

Joan filled in the blanks herself. “You started calling hospitals,” she responded dully, remembering what Moriarty had been starting to tell Sherlock right before noticing Joan in the doorway.

Sherlock’s grip on Joan’s arm twitched slightly, his nails scoring light traces on her skin. “Statistically, it was unlikely that you would have been hurt in the initial crush,” he confirmed hollowly, speaking for the first time since Joan had sat him down. “But the building collapsed in stages, rather than all at once, and you take your Oath seriously. You would have gone in to assist the injured, and…”

It wasn’t until then, seeing the residual shadows on Sherlock’s face and understanding what he must have felt in deducing his own loss, that Joan realized that a part of her, hiding behind the Hendersons’ steps down the street and staring at the brownstone, had been afraid that Sherlock and Moriarty were already dead.

She took a shaky breath.

“Would you believe,” she said after a long moment, “that part of the reason it took me so long to get home was that I saw the front door wide open, and assumed that someone was trying to shoot us again?”

Sherlock, remarkably, managed to look very slightly ashamed of himself. “Ah. That was…I _may_ have reacted somewhat abruptly when Captain Gregson informed me that the National Guard was not in the habit of immediately materializing in response to a ‘building malfunction’,” he admitted with a glance around the trashed room, his distaste for the concept or the choice of words evident in his tone.

Moriarty nodded seriously in agreement. “I was working on it, but it likely would have taken another hour and two or three arms trades of questionable legality,” she confirmed. “I’d have done it in the end, but Americans choose the most inconvenient times to be deliberately obtuse.”

Sherlock nodded emphatically in response.

Joan briefly closed her eyes.

She was surrounded by ridiculous people, but there was a time and a place to acknowledge that fact out loud. This wasn’t it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The rest of the day passed in a timeless blur. Someone ordered takeout that nobody felt especially like eating but everybody picked at, and, much like in the Great Deductive Pissing Contest that had taken place during Moriarty’s first week at the brownstone, Joan was bombarded with mug after mug of tea, Sherlock and Moriarty taking turns pressing them into her hands. Joan had planned on getting other things done in the afternoon, but between the icy rain that had begun lashing at the windows, Sherlock’s visceral displeasure every time she even hinted at maybe getting off the couch and going back out, and her own sudden, palpable exhaustion, Joan ended up spending the day ensconced in a pile of blankets in the living room, torn between listlessly reading through unsolved case files and watching the news coverage of the accident (and its ever-climbing injury count).

“I didn’t even know that anything was wrong until I got home,” Joan heard herself unnecessarily saying at one point, resting her head on the back of the couch and letting her eyes drift shut. “If I had been there just a little bit longer, or if I hadn’t gone so early this morning, I might have been able to help. I sort of wish—“

“I don’t,” Sherlock cut her off sharply, lowering the sheaf of newspaper clippings he was holding by the fistful and looking squarely at her. “I’m glad you weren’t there, and I won’t apologize for wanting to know that you’re safe, even at the expense of others. None of them are you.”

A better person would have disagreed. Joan tilted her head toward Sherlock and let the corner of her mouth tilt upward in a slow, small smile.

She’d be a better person when she wasn’t so tired.

 

* * *

 

 

When Joan woke up the next morning, it was because she couldn’t feel her right foot.

It didn’t take long for her to figure out why—somewhere in between the incessant news reports (nine people were dead; forty-one injured), the phone ringing off the hook, the subsequent shouting whenever Sherlock answered the phone, and the combined-force hovering of both Sherlock and Moriarty (which, for the record, she was only putting up with temporarily because Sherlock, at least, was showing signs of shock), Joan had fallen asleep on the couch.

Sherlock, in a spine-contorting position that he would surely regret when he woke up, had fallen asleep on the floor by her legs with his hand wrapped around her ankle, his index finger draped loosely over her posterior tibial pulse. 

Stifling a yawn, Joan sat up, brushing her hair out of her face, and gently freed her leg from Sherlock’s grasp, wincing as the flow of blood to her foot returned in painfully full force. Sherlock’s hand twitched, but his breathing remained slow and even. His blanket had slid down to his waist sometime during the night, and Joan reached down to resettle it, frowning slightly when she realized that she couldn’t remember having ever seen it before. She looked down at her own pile of blankets. There were still four—she’d had to threaten overheating and potential immolation to stop Sherlock from forcing a fifth one on her—but she, too, now had a soft, finely-woven dark blue blanket that likely cost more than all the rest of them combined.

Her suspicions now taking on a particular shape, Joan’s eyes darted around the room, stopping when they landed on a familiar figure curled up, fast asleep, in Sherlock’s armchair.

Joan’s missing blanket was draped over Moriarty, almost but not quite hiding Joan’s college sweatshirt that she’d been wearing earlier that week.

Curled up in a ball and buried in layers, she looked so much smaller than Joan remembered. _When she was Irene…_

Joan shook her head, clearing it. Her memories of Irene weren’t reliable anymore, muddled as they were with her anger at Moriarty’s deception and all of the complicated, ever-changing concerns she’d had for Sherlock’s well-being at the time. Still, seeing Moriarty as she was at that moment was enough to make Joan wonder who she might have been, had circumstances been different. What she would have been like; whether Sherlock would have fallen in love with her just as quickly and deeply; whether she still would have found Joan as fascinating.

Tucking her blanket back over Moriarty’s shoulder, just as she’d done for Sherlock, Joan headed down to the kitchen to start the coffee and tea.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Near-death experiences, alarmingly, were becoming somewhat par for the course for Joan since becoming a detective. Still, she’d never get used to the interim period of being awkwardly handled with kid gloves before everyone went back to normal, no matter how many times it happened.

Ms. Hudson, who tended to fuss over Joan anyway because she was convinced that nobody else was doing it properly (and because “I’ve known Sherlock for years, my dear, so I know exactly the sorts of things you wake up to”), brought over baklava, wildflowers, and lotion and facial masks made of honey and lavender, as well as strict instructions to Sherlock and Moriarty to leave her alone while she used them.

“These are _relaxing_ agents,” she stressed to them, standing over a half-amused, half-mortified Joan and fussing with her hair, as Sherlock and Moriarty absorbed the warning like chastised children (Sherlock out of deference, Moriarty because…who knew why). “Stressing her out completely negates the purpose of them, and she looks like she’s had quite enough of that.”

Sherlock’s compulsive hovering stopped almost as quickly as it started, but three days after the building collapse, Joan walked into the kitchen for breakfast and instead had a large box shoved into her arms. Inside were three new phone chargers, an armband sized to hold her phone while she ran, six extra burner phones (“In case, incredibly, you failed to make use of the now-four chargers in your possession and are short on time”), and an Road ID with Joan’s personal information printed on it, along with phone numbers for Sherlock, the brownstone, and Captain Gregson’s direct line at the precinct.

“You can wear it as a bracelet, if you like,” Sherlock explained cheerfully, demonstrating on his own wrist before proudly presenting it to Joan. “Or if you find it uncomfortable while running, you can adjust the sizing here, and strap it to anything—your shoelaces, your waistband, the strap of your sports brassiere—“

“Okay, I thought we said that you were going to stop talking about my underwear,” Joan reminded him.

Moriarty’s approach was somewhat more direct.

“She put a tracker in your shoe?” Marcus asked, disbelieving, when Joan explained how she’d spent her morning—namely, taking tweezers to half of her possessions to get rid of the tracking dots.

“Not shoe,” Joan clarified, rolling her eyes, “shoes. All of them. And my purses, and I’m sure there’s one on my favorite coat somewhere, but she either has or _is_ the world’s best tailor, because I haven’t found it yet.”

Marcus shook his head, whistling softly. “And a few of the guys were worried that the card might be overkill,” he shared, nodding at the bouquet of flowers and the card on the counter that he’d brought to Joan from the station. “I’ll let them know that we had nothing to worry about.”

Joan sighed, picking up her coffee mug. “The worst part is that I’m pretty sure she legitimately thinks that this is a good idea,” she confided, glancing at the door even though she knew Moriarty was out for the afternoon. “It isn’t her deliberately trying to provoke me or prove a point; I think she thinks she’s being nice by demonstrating concern.”

Marcus shuddered. “Makes you wonder what she’d do if she was trying to get a rise out of you,” he mused. “A team of assassins as bodyguards, maybe?”  

Joan’s eyes went wide, and there was an awkward pause.

Marcus put his coffee down. “I was joking,” he said slowly, eyeing Joan oddly.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It took Joan five days to find and dismiss all three of the covert bodyguards that Moriarty had hired.

“No matter,” Moriarty quipped philosophically, when Joan included the tidbit of information with yet another lecture on personal boundaries. “If they can’t go undetected for even a full week, then they ought not be in the profession in the first place. I’ll start interviewing new candidates immediately; thank you for bringing the matter to my attention, Joan.”

Joan hated everyone.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone breaks things and owns dangerous weaponry and puts Joan through the wringer, but what else is new?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I continue to be blown away by the response to this--thanks and rock on, darlings.
> 
> A note on canon: regardless of what ends up happening on Thursday's episode re: Joan and Sherlock's living situation, in this story they are clearly still in the brownstone. If that changes in the show, I may or may not address it in this story, depending on the circumstances.

* * *

 

Despite Joan’s many, many objections—which she voiced too often and too loudly for there to be any mistaking her displeasure—it wasn’t unusual for her to wake up to find Sherlock standing in the doorway of her room or at the foot of her bed, clutching a case file or a breakfast tray or an outfit he’d picked out for her and eagerly waiting for her to notice him.

It was, however, unusual for Joan to wake up to find Moriarty doing the same, and it was her firmly-held opinion that accidently knocking both her phone and her book off of the nightstand in surprise was an entirely appropriate response.

Moriarty handed them back to her with amusement. “Oh good, you’re awake,” she noted, as Joan snatched her things back and clutched her blanket to her chest. “Sherlock’s storming around downstairs; something about twenty dead bodies in a septic tank. I rather thought that you might want to eat _before_ he comes up here with photographs.”

Joan’s brain, jolted awake, began to catch up with her fight-or-flight response. “You know how there’s a locked door between me and the rest of the house?” she pointed out, voice too rusty from disuse to be truly snappish. “That’s on purpose—you need to knock next time.

“And _every_ time,” she added quickly, seeing a thoughtful look in Moriarty’s eye.

Moriarty smiled without a hint of shame. “You were sleeping,” she countered, pointedly eyeing the tray on the end of Joan’s bed before looking back. “I didn’t want to wake you before you were ready; you’ve made it exceedingly clear how irritating you find that.”

Joan scowled in response. “I also find it irritating and _creepy_ when people are in here watching me sleep,” she informed Moriarty coolly, picking up the bottle of orange juice from the tray and cracking the seal.

A swift glance at the tray revealed that Moriarty was capable of learning, after all: the other items she had chosen—a granola bar, banana, and miniature box of cereal—were also sealed or otherwise protected against tampering. Joan fought a smile at that, taking a sip of juice.

Moriarty’s brow furrowed in an (entirely fake, Joan wasn’t an idiot) innocent expression of confusion. “But—“

“No,” Joan cut her off, too familiar with Moriarty’s methods of baiting her after nearly seven weeks of dealing with them. “It’s not an emergency unless someone is about to die without my direct intervention, I don’t mean that metaphorically, and Sherlock is _also_ not allowed to watch me sleep. It took him many, many blunt objects to the head to learn that lesson, and he still forgets it sometimes. You claim to be smarter than him; figure it out faster.”

Moriarty left the room, beaming.

Joan moved the tray to the floor and went back to sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The first snowfall of the year that amounted to more than a light dusting came one morning in mid-November; early for New York, and the portent of a dark winter to come. Joan had already stocked up on paper products and nonperishables in the event of another blizzard that kept them housebound (they might have had a snowplow driver on speed dial, but she had days off, just like everybody else), and a giant bag of rock salt was taking up space in the closet in the front hall.

It was apparent elsewhere in the brownstone that autumn was swiftly coming to an end, as well. The beehives had long since been covered and insulated for the winter, the work of a long afternoon that had had Joan’s arms aching by the end of it for the second year in a row (it would have been a third, but her association with Sherlock had been such a new, fragile thing that first fall; he hadn’t yet known how to ask for help of any kind, and she hadn’t yet realized that he wanted to). Moriarty’s paintings and supplies, a fixture on the roof for several weeks running, were practically overflowing from a spare room on the top floor where Moriarty spent a few hours every day—and where Joan and Sherlock tended to avoid, unless searching for bombs or priceless stolen artifacts. Clyde’s turtle cozies, well-loved but tucked away in a drawer during the warmer months, had been aired out and laundered and were back in circulation for the season.

And Joan, mostly out of a habit that predated her medical license but also partly in response to the CDC reports predicting a particularly virulent strain of influenza ravaging the East Coast that winter, had stopped by the clinic one weekday morning and gotten her flu shot. 

Unfortunately, she was the only one in the brownstone that possessed even a token modicum of common sense.

Sherlock, with his fragile immune system that had yet to fully recover from years of insomnia and drug abuse, was the first to fall ill. Joan, who never pushed him to get vaccinated for the obvious reason that injecting a syringe full of liquid into his arm might bring back some unwanted urges—“Tattoo needles are quite different, Watson, I assure you,” Sherlock had insisted, the one time she’d asked. “Hold out your arm, if you’d prefer not to take my word for it.”—had nevertheless seen him through three previous bouts of the flu, and was consequently prepared to tranquilize him through the worst of his illness if she had to.

Surprisingly, though, her intervention was unnecessary—Sherlock’s symptoms, though unmistakably present, were so mild that if Joan hadn’t known for certain that he was drinking grape-flavored medicine straight from the bottle and sleeping twelve hours a night, she almost could have written it off as a nasty cold. Sherlock’s illness quickly ran its course, and he was back to what passed as normal for him within a week.

Moriarty wasn’t as fortunate.

Being Moriarty, however, she couldn’t just admit that she was sick and deal with it like a normal person (though, to her credit, she also didn’t pull a Sherlock and construct an alternate, delusional reality in which she was completely fine and everyone else was ridiculous for thinking that a little thing like a 102-degree fever ought to keep her in bed). Instead, she shut herself up in her room for several days without explanation, only coming out at night or when left alone at the brownstone in order to stockpile fresh supplies of food and medicine—and, bizarrely, to dump piles of ash down the drain in the kitchen.

(“Burned tissues,” Sherlock deduced, after he and Joan had stared wordlessly at the sink for several moments. “Rather clever, really, given the veritable host of extractable DNA they must have contained.  I propose we adopt a similar practice, Watson; the number of enemies we have who would leap at the opportunity to see us falsely imprisoned will only get larger.”

Joan had struggled deeply to avoid commenting.)

Moriarty’s self-imposed isolation, however, couldn’t hide the sounds of her frequent, violent coughing fits, and after four days of listening to the increasingly pitiful sounds emanating from the room off of the kitchen, Joan pointedly left a quart of chicken noodle soup and a sleeve of crackers in the refrigerator.

They were still there the next morning, and Moriarty had passive-aggressively taken everything else that had been on the shelf.

“Next time, leave them next to the condiments,” Sherlock suggested not-at-all helpfully as Joan glared at the empty spaces where her milk and leftover takeout had been the night before. “Despite your best efforts to impose your arbitrary standards of cleanliness upon the household, I’m not entirely certain that anyone’s touched the majority of them since I moved in.”

Joan opted to ignore him, instead choosing to leave the soup directly in front of Moriarty’s door and darkly relishing the crashing sound (and subsequent string of profanity) that ensued around midnight.

It was absolutely childish, she knew, but even so, having to mop the floor the next morning barely put a dent in her satisfaction.

 

* * *

 

 

Joan, without dwelling on it seriously or for more than a few seconds at a time in an effort to preserve her sanity, had nevertheless assumed that when Moriarty finally left the brownstone, it would be with a bang rather than a whimper—she and Sherlock getting chloroformed in the middle of the night in order to give her a several-hour head start to a non-extradition country, perhaps, or something involving mass casualties or a hostage situation.

It came as a surprise, then, when Detective Bell congratulated her on finally getting Moriarty out of her hair one early afternoon, standing on the periphery of a crime scene as Sherlock sniffed at the evidence.

“Sorry?” Joan asked distractedly as Sherlock all but shoved his nose into the victim’s shoe, certain that she’d heard him wrong.

Apparently, she hadn’t. “The Captain got a call from the Feds this morning,” he clarified, watching Sherlock with a resigned, unwillingly amused expression on his face. “They said that she’d booked a flight to Bangladesh that leaves in a couple of hours. Don’t know if she’s on it, but it’s all above board, according to them.”

Joan blinked, her mind oddly blank.

Moriarty had really done it. She’d finally left, and with none of the fanfare that Joan had anticipated. Which suddenly seemed like exactly the sort of thing that Moriarty would do, slipping away unannounced, leaving nothing but questions and empty spaces behind.

Joan had been silent for a beat too long. “Is that normal, for federal law enforcement to keep you in the loop like that?” she made herself ask, forcing herself to keep her voice even, to keep her eyes on Sherlock (who had moved on from the shoes and was staring intently at the victim’s left sleeve).

Marcus stifled a laugh in Joan’s peripheral vision. “Not even a little,” he admitted. “I think it was a professional courtesy, seeing as the department made the original arrest and was loudly unhappy about it when they let her go.” He looked over at Joan momentarily before shifting his gaze back to the scene. “Frankly, I’m surprised that the three of you lasted this long without anyone getting killed or arrested.”

Joan swallowed. “It was…definitely an experience,” she allowed dryly, beginning to feel sick to her stomach.

It was possible that Moriarty hadn’t gotten on the plane at all, and had bought the ticket for her own incomprehensible reasons. Or, if she had left, that there would be a note for her and Sherlock back at home, explaining what she had done and why. Most likely, however, Marcus was right, and she and Sherlock would return to the brownstone and find it empty. Which meant that it would fall to Joan to tell Sherlock, with no clear idea of how he would react or how the news would affect him.

Marcus, oblivious to her growing dread, laughed in agreement. “Understatement of the year, I’m guessing,” he replied with a quick grin. “How’s Holmes taking your return to the world of sane living?”

Fortunately, Joan didn’t have to come up with a lie—Sherlock chose that moment to spring up from the ground and face her expectantly, practically vibrating with excitement. “Right,” he began, hands twitching at his sides. “Watson, your expertise is required in Ms. Grant’s armoire; unless I am very much mistaken—which I am not,” he informed Detective Bell, who rolled his eyes pointedly and gestured for Sherlock to continue, “—the key to capturing her killer lies in her no-doubt vast collection of undergarments.”

Some combination of professional habit and repeated exposure to Sherlock’s brand of outlandishness kept Joan from facepalming on the spot.

“Sherlock,” she replied calmly, instead, “think about what you just asked me; I’ll wait.”

Joan could practically see the wheels turning in Sherlock’s brain, taking all of three seconds to process Joan’s request and reach the same conclusion that she had—that despite her being the target market for the lingerie industry, most of her things came from the same two or three stores, whereas Sherlock had so many notches on his bedpost that it was a wonder his mattress hadn’t yet crashed to the floor. “Ah,” he responded, nodding at her in approval. “Of course, you’re absolutely correct. Very astute, Watson. Come!”

Without waiting for her or Detective Bell, Sherlock bounded off in the direction of the stairs.

Marcus looked at Joan skeptically. “Guess I spoke too soon,” he admitted, giving the body on the floor a wide berth as he walked around it and followed in Sherlock’s wake. “Do I even want to know?”

Joan shook her head. “Probably not,” she answered with a sympathetic sigh.

And it was true—Sherlock’s familiarity with an incredible variety of women’s underwear would have been awkward to explain under any circumstances; anything that came close to implying that much of his personal knowledge came courtesy of his habitual patronization of the world’s oldest profession would have been awkward to explain _and_ would have generated paperwork.

Better to let Marcus draw his own conclusions, Joan decided, as they reached the top of the stairs and found Sherlock rapidly explaining his deductions to Captain Gregson, who was already relaying orders into his phone. She wouldn’t be telling them anything that Sherlock wouldn’t happily admit to—and to the best of Joan’s purposefully limited knowledge, all of his ‘meetings’ and ‘appointments’ were perfectly legal—but the larger the separation between Sherlock’s sex life and their cases, the better.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

As often as Sherlock had accused Joan of being ‘utterly transparent’ or otherwise easy to read, there were equally as many times when Joan had caught him looking at her with an expression of pure bafflement on his face, as if she were a puzzle that he had no explanation for. It was a line of thinking that she actively tried to discourage (to the extent that her “I am a person, not a case study” lecture had been effectively shorthanded to a single warning glance), but even so, it was a relief to know that, however gifted Sherlock was at constructing a narrative from the most minute of details or correctly ascribing motives to people seemingly unconnected to their crimes, there were still parts of her that were unknowable to him; that even while living under a microscope in her own home (and with locks on the door that might as well not have been there at all, for all the good they did), there was still privacy in her own head.

 

The investigation turned out to be a relatively simple one, when compared to the majority of the NYPD cases that she and Sherlock were usually called in for. Sherlock’s observation about the victim’s underwear had been the correct one, and her twin sister’s former boyfriend had been apprehended and handcuffed within a few hours.  The department was pleased, Sherlock was satisfied, and Joan…

Joan almost regretted it—without the case to concentrate on, she had little to distract her from Moriarty’s abrupt departure.

She was _not_ upset about it, she really wasn’t. Still, something about the suddenness of it—the complete lack of warning despite the obvious foreknowledge that international travel required; the idea that if Marcus hadn’t said anything, she would have simply walked into the brownstone to find Moriarty’s room empty—left Joan feeling…unsettled.

Joan could feel Sherlock’s gaze lingering on her in the cab on the way home; could practically sense his puzzled frown as he tried to work out the cause of her mood. She deliberately avoided looking back, staring listlessly out the window instead.

Sherlock was another factor to consider. It was unfair, Joan knew, to keep what little she knew about Moriarty’s probable departure to herself; Sherlock’s history with Moriarty predated Joan’s association with either of them, and was likely more complicated than she knew—whatever she could tell him, he deserved to know. Still, something held her back, and she stayed quiet even as Sherlock mutedly redirected the taxi to Joan’s favorite Indian restaurant and left the meter running for ten minutes while picking up their favorite order.

Sherlock hadn’t been in love with Moriarty for a long time, but Joan knew that he was likely lying to both of them when he insisted that he not only no longer had feelings of any sort for Moriarty, but that his being in love with Irene Adler was “…no longer a factor, given the fabrication of her very _existence_ , Watson.” And Joan, despite being able to see through Sherlock more clearly on the matter than even he could, had no idea how he would take the realization that the woman he both adored and reviled, whom he and Joan had begun to take for granted as a presence in the brownstone, had once again vanished without warning or explanation.

She was almost positive that he had no intention of using again. If he did end up breaking, though, the first thing that Joan was going to do after driving him to rehab was book a flight to South Asia and kill Moriarty herself.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Sherlock continued to watch her on and off with some concern all the way back to the brownstone, but it wasn’t until they were unpacking the takeout bags on the counter (where there was no note from Moriarty to be found) that he pressed her to talk. “Are you planning on telling me what’s been bothering you since this afternoon, Watson?” he wondered finally, but not unkindly. “Because if it’s to do with the two phone calls from your brother that you ignored at the crime scene, you should know that I’ve already arranged to spend Thursday working discreetly with a rather well-known museum that wishes to remain unnamed on the matter of several potentially forged paintings. I was planning on taking Moriarty with me, given that her expertise on the subject outstrips my own, so you needn’t worry about leaving us to our own devices for the afternoon.”

He paused. “Provided you bring back a pie, of course,” he added, lacing his fingers behind his back and watching Joan hopefully.

Joan smiled weakly in response, both utterly fond of Sherlock in that moment and not at all surprised that he had worked out the dilemma that had been bothering her the day before: how to manage Thanksgiving dinner the following week without disinviting Sherlock, who had thoroughly enjoyed himself the previous year despite it not being ‘his’ holiday—“All the best parts of Sunday dinner without the odious presence of my rather loathsome relatives,” he’d assessed cheerfully after they’d left, weighed down by several pounds of leftovers pressed onto him by Joan’s mother. “And do you have any idea how common patricide becomes around the holidays?”—or turning up at Oren and Gabrielle’s apartment to find Moriarty already there, charming her family and sitting altogether too close to the carving knives.

Of course, it had all become irrelevant. “I’m pretty sure my mother will make you your very own pie if you hint at your favorite flavor the next time she calls,” Joan assured him, wearily closing her eyes so that she didn’t have to see the hope and worry warring on Sherlock’s face turn into something…more complicated. “And thank you, but I was talking to Marcus this afternoon, and—“

Joan never finished her sentence—in a practically Shakespearian piece of timing, her confession was cut off by a loud crash from the room next to the kitchen that made both her and Sherlock jump, followed by a startled cry that had Sherlock running for Moriarty’s door.

“Hold that thought, Watson,” he called behind him, despite the fact that Joan had reacted only half a second slower, and had reached the door at practically the same time.

“Sherlock—“ she managed to get out as he grabbed the door handle and shoved, but it was too late; the door was thrown open, and Sherlock bounded into the room. Cursing silently, Joan darted after him.

And almost instantly crashed into Sherlock, who had frozen only a few feet past the door frame.

It was immediately obvious what had caused the shattering sound that they’d heard from the kitchen—the porcelain lamp that Moriarty had kept on the table next to her bed was in pieces on the floor, the crumpled, bent lampshade cast off to the side.

The source behind the crash was also immediately obvious: a trail of bloody footprints shimmered in the light from the kitchen, leading to the far corner of the room where Moriarty stood, her shoulders drooping and her lank, unwashed hair partly covering her face even as she kept her back against the wall. Her eyes were dark and heavily shadowed, no doubt a side effect of her illness, and her white, antique-looking nightgown was damp with sweat, contrasting sharply with her bare, crimson-streaked feet.

She looked, Joan thought wildly, irrationally, like a child in a horror movie: pale, angelic, and with an unsettling aura of innocence about her that, if they really had been in a movie, would have foreshadowed the nightmare to come.

In her hands, pointed at the floor but with her finger on the trigger, was a gun.

 

She looked up suddenly, her eyes unfocused and feverish, and both Joan and Sherlock slowly, instinctively held up their hands.

Moriarty didn’t seem to notice, staring intently at Sherlock’s face. “I am having,” she declared solemnly after several moments, her voice thick with sleep or illness, “a very unpleasant dream.”

Joan glanced at Sherlock, her hands suspended unthreateningly in the air.

Sherlock was watching Moriarty with exaggerated care. “You’re not dreaming,” he replied slowly, in the calm voice that Joan recognized from interviews with innocent-but-potentially-unstable witnesses. “You’re awake and you’re ill, with a very high fever. It’s quite possible that you’re hallucinating; is there anything in this room that you know is not real?”

Moriarty didn’t answer, her eyes trailing slowly back and forth between him and Joan.

Joan swallowed. “You’re sick,” she reiterated, her voice steadier than she would have guessed it would be, under the circumstances. “There’s nobody here but the three of us; nobody’s trying to hurt you. Please put the gun down.”

Moriarty frowned slightly, her brow crinkling. “Someone broke the lamp,” she explained, looking at the pieces on the floor between them and shifting her weight slightly. “I woke up when it hit the ground.”

Sherlock nodded encouragingly. “Yes, that’s right; that was you,” he answered gently. “You were likely having a nightmare and lashed out—just an accident.”

Moriarty looked unconvinced, and Joan watched as Sherlock tilted his head deferentially, as if he hadn’t expected her to believe him. “Would you like me to examine the security footage?” he offered, slowly lowering his hands. “You could come with me and see it yourself, if you like, but I’m afraid I cannot remove the computer from the station without triggering the failsafe, which would be…somewhat counterproductive.”

Moriarty continued to frown, but she nodded slightly toward the door in what looked like agreement. “If you lie to me, I’ll know,” she warned Sherlock, sounding slow and tired, still, but more lucid than before.

Sherlock nodded again. “This is my home,” he pointed out, with none of the sarcasm or frustration that typically accompanied his stating of the obvious. “If anyone’s broken in, I’d certainly want to be the first to know.”

His eyes flickered briefly over to Joan. “Watson,” he prompted in the same even tone, back to watching Moriarty, “if you would, please?”

Joan didn’t need him to clarify the request. “You changed the passwords again the other day,” she reminded him, a familiar observation that often came up whenever Sherlock deemed himself too busy to stop whatever he was doing and research something. “I won’t be able to get onto your computer.”

As usual, Sherlock frowned petulantly at the inconvenience, a familiar expression that seemed almost ridiculously out of place given the situation. “That was meant to be a deductive exercise,” he explained halfheartedly, “but I expect we’re all in agreement that now is perhaps not the best time for that. Remind me to teach you how to hack the feed.”

He shook his head slightly, clearing it. “Right,” he stated more decisively, and Joan lowered her hands as slowly as she’d first raised them. “I’ll check the footage now,” he told Moriarty, who was beginning to wilt slightly with exhaustion—and possibly, Joan considered, blood loss.

“If I am going to leave you, though,” Sherlock continued, with another flicker of a glance at Joan, “you need to put the gun down—you’re frightening Watson.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Joan would have been irritated both by the assumption and by Sherlock’s exposure of what he and Moriarty would likely consider to be a weakness on her part. The circumstances, however, were far from ordinary, and Joan couldn’t even bring herself to muster a token feeling of annoyance at Sherlock’s overprotective streak when it came to her.

Because it was true: Moriarty had a gun in her hands, and Joan was afraid.

Still, Sherlock’s statement had an immediate effect on Moriarty, whose gaze snapped to Joan in surprise, almost as if she’d forgotten that Joan was there. Without looking at her hands, Moriarty clicked on the safety and carefully placed the gun next to her on the floor. Joan felt the tension in her chest begin to ease a little, and Sherlock let out a relieved sigh. “All right,” he breathed soothingly, “excellent. I’ll take a look, then?”

He looked questioningly at Joan, who paused for a second, but nodded. “We’ll be fine,” she assured him, “it’s okay.”

Sherlock nodded back, giving her a look that Joan knew meant that he’d be swearing at the computer in a futile effort to make it go faster, and quickly left the room, leaving Joan alone with Moriarty.

Moriarty, who was still crouched on the floor within easy reach of her gun, the blood trickling from her feet beginning to form dark pools around her.

Joan eyed them with concern. “You should sit down on the bed and let me take a look at your feet,” she suggested, absently noting that she’d slipped into Sherlock’s witness-soothing tone in his absence. “They must be cut up pretty badly, for you to have lost so much blood so quickly.”

Moriarty blinked slowly, looking up at Joan. “I’d almost forgotten,” she admitted, and despite the absurdity of the statement, Joan almost believed her. “You hadn’t said anything before, Joan; I hadn’t realized that you’re afraid of guns.”

Joan started, momentarily surprised, but quickly relaxed, suppressing an eyeroll—even bleeding and semi-delirious, Moriarty couldn’t help but try and worm her way under Joan’s skin. “Anyone with an ounce of common sense should be afraid around a gun when it’s being held by someone willing to pull the trigger,” she pointed out rationally, carefully sitting down on the edge of Moriarty’s bed. “And I’m serious about your feet; you should get your weight off of them before you do any more damage.”

Moriarty, staring at the open door, gave no sign that she’d heard Joan at all.

Joan sighed. “Why would anyone have come after you here?” she wondered out loud, trying a different approach. “I thought you were supposed to be on a plane out of the country right now.”

Moriarty’s gaze whipped back to Joan. “How did—ah,” she realized, cutting herself off, “your friends at the police. I see that indiscretion at the federal level is still alive and well, then.”

Joan raised an eyebrow, waiting.

Moriarty mirrored the expression, before shrugging her shoulders. “I had a decoy on the flight, obviously,” she sighed, closing her eyes briefly before forcibly blinking them back open and looking back up at Joan.  “A temporary distraction for those with an active interest in my whereabouts. I’m rather more unwell than I first thought, and I needed a few days to get back on my feet, as it were.” She looked wryly down at her feet, where the glistening streaks of blood were growing worryingly thick.

Joan felt almost nauseated, looking at them. “Mor—this is ridiculous,” she muttered, tilting her head back and shutting her eyes with a sigh before looking back down at Moriarty. “Jamie,” she tried, using Moriarty’s name out loud for the first time, “you are bleeding all over the floor. If you want to wait to take care of them until Sherlock gets back—it’s a stupid decision, but they’re your feet. But I’m telling you as a former doctor, and as someone who isn’t incapacitated by the flu right now, that you need to _sit down_ before you permanently damage your feet, if you haven’t done it already.”

Moriarty blinked meekly in surprise.

“If I am hallucinating,” she replied slowly, her gaze assessing on Joan’s face, “my subconscious was impressively accurate until just now.”

Her hand inched slowly back toward the gun, and Joan felt her heart beginning to speed up again.

Her fear must have shown on her face, though, because Moriarty paused suddenly, before nodding. “All right,” she agreed, “I’ll sit. But the gun comes with me.”

Joan sighed, but nodded in return. “Keep the safety on, then,” she instructed flatly. “Do you need any help?”

She didn’t—or wouldn’t take it, anyway—and a few painful minutes later, Moriarty was sitting on her bed, gun next to her on the bedspread but pointed at the wall behind her, while Joan knelt on a clean patch of floor and examined her feet. As Joan had feared, there were several places in which the broken porcelain and glass had pierced the skin, and a few shards had become trapped in the messier of the wounds, keeping them open and bleeding. “These are going to need to be looked at, and soon,” Joan warned her, delicately shifting her left foot to get a better look at the heel in the dark room. “You might need to get this piece removed surgically.”

Moriarty didn’t react, and Joan continued her examination in silence, wiping away the worst of the blood where she could.

“I’m going to leave, you know.”

Joan looked up in surprise. Moriarty’s gaze was far away again, hazy and unfocused somewhere over Joan’s head. “Nobody knows where I am, precisely,” she continued, her voice quiet and exhausted, “and that is by design, but eventually someone will figure out the truth; your hapless friends in the police have proven well enough that nothing stays buried forever.”

She paused, and Joan watched her blink slowly, both entranced and aware that interrupting would likely bring Moriarty’s soliloquy to a sudden halt.

When Moriarty spoke again, there was a new note of resolve in her tone. “I am the very best at what I do,” she informed Joan simply, still looking away. “And I would never allow any of my enemies to hurt you or Sherlock, or let any harm come to you through my own enterprises. But someday, I will have a very bad day precisely when someone else is having a very good one. And while I’d take great personal satisfaction in skinning them alive over a very prolonged period of time,”—and at that, her lips quirked into a hint of a smile—“it wouldn’t make you any less dead. And I’d be willing to tear the world apart for lesser reasons.”

Her eyes met Joan’s, and anything that Joan could have said, any response that she could have made, died in her throat.

The silence was broken, seconds later, by the deliberately loud stomping of Sherlock’s feet as he approached the door from down the hall.

 

* * *

 

 

 

As both Joan and Sherlock had strongly suspected, the security footage and silent alarms had been clean and untampered with when Sherlock checked them, and it hadn’t taken much convincing after that to talk Moriarty into putting her gun back into the drawer, safety still securely engaged.

Joan hadn’t, however, been able to convince Moriarty to let them take her to a hospital or an urgent care center to get her feet taken care of, not even by threatening to refuse to treat Moriarty herself—Moriarty had called her bluff and had countered with a threat to bleed out in excruciating pain in their guest room. It had been clear to Joan that Sherlock believed Moriarty would follow through out of sheer stubbornness, so despite her better judgment, Joan once again found herself stitching up Moriarty’s skin, with Sherlock acting as her de facto nurse—disinfecting Joan’s medical equipment, handing her tools as she needed them, gently holding Moriarty’s ankles steady as Joan worked, adjusting the floor lamp they’d dragged in from the living room as necessary, and watching the entire procedure in abject fascination.

Joan herself was less than fascinated.

“If you even try to stand up before I clear you to do so, I am calling an ambulance,” she threatened flatly, brushing Moriarty’s lank hair off of her forehead while waiting for the thermometer to finish assessing her temperature, Sherlock finally cleaning the broken shards of the table lamp off of the floor. “You’ve lost too much blood as it is, and your temperature”—the thermometer beeped right on cue, and Joan yanked it out of Moriarty’s mouth without hesitating—“is over 100 degrees, which is not at all reassuring.”

Moriarty, thoroughly drugged between a combination of painkillers and flu medication, smiled lazily at Joan. “It sounds so _dramatic_ when you say it like that,” she pointed out, her eyelashes fluttering as she fought to keep her eyes open. “I’d suggest learning metric before 2018, Dr. Watson; the legislation to bring your backwards country in line with the rest of the world ought to be pushed through by then.”

Joan bristled at the ‘doctor’ comment and shot Sherlock, who was lingering in the doorway with his full dustpan and having trouble suppressing his amusement even for Joan’s sake, an annoyed look that made him retreat to the kitchen in self-preservation. “Well, who knows,” she theorized coolly, not bothering to mention that every doctor, regardless of nationality, took their measurements in metric. “Maybe you’ll die of the flu or from blood loss before then, and we’ll stay backward forever.”

Moriarty laughed, and Joan pushed herself up off of the bed where she had been sitting, intending to follow Sherlock out the door.

A sweat-damp hand clasped her wrist, making her jump with surprise.

“If anyone asks,” Moriarty implored, her eyes barely open, “I sent you a postcard from Asia.”

Joan looked down at Moriarty. The frightening, almost wild look that she had possessed before was gone, leaving only a tired, vulnerable-looking Jamie in her place.

It was still unsettling, but in an entirely different way.

Joan gently pulled her arm out of Moriarty’s grasp. “If anyone asks, I’ll say that you wrote something smug and awful, and that I threw it away before Sherlock saw it,” she replied, tugging at the duvet on the bed until it reached Moriarty’s shoulders.

Moriarty hummed sleepily. “Hmm, you would, wouldn’t you?” she wondered drowsily, before finally drifting off to sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Sherlock was waiting for Joan in the kitchen, tucking the last of her sterilized tools back into her medical bag. “I don’t say this to further anger you, Watson, nor as a reaction to Moriarty’s ill-chosen barb,” he said over his shoulder, his tone too casually light to be anything but deliberately chosen. “However, given the frequency with which your medical expertise seems to be called for, completing your continuing education hours before your medical license expires might well be a worthwhile pursuit.”

Joan pinched the bridge of her nose, attempting to ease the headache that had slowly been building over the previous half an hour. ”Don’t go there right now,” she warned tiredly, firmly shutting down the avenue of conversation. “Someone needs to stay with her tonight and make sure she doesn’t get worse; if her fever doesn’t break soon, she’s going to need a hospital whether she wants it or not.”

Sherlock nodded vigorously. “Agreed,” he replied, zipping Joan’s bag shut and placing it reverently on the counter in front of her. “I’ll wake you up if necessary.”

Joan nodded her assent, and they stood there in silence.

After a moment, Sherlock ducked his head, tracing a fingertip absently along the counter. “Do you know,” he offered, sounding more subdued than usual, “Irene used to have nightmares, when she was ill. She’d never elaborate on them when asked, but she’d wake up disoriented and upset, and it would take her some time to calm down enough to fall back asleep.”

He paused. “It had never occurred to me, after everything, to wonder whether or not that piece of her was real until tonight, after I’d been clearly presented with the answer.”

Joan watched quietly as Sherlock’s hands opened and closed methodically, the tendons in his arms straining. “Did you know she had a gun here?” she asked, and wasn’t surprised when he let out a mirthless laugh.

“Did you assume otherwise?” he countered, not unkindly, and Joan sighed in response.

“I guess we should be grateful that it wasn’t a pipe bomb, at least,” she decided after a minute, glancing over at Sherlock.

Sherlock, who was looking…suspiciously uncomfortable.

Joan swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry.

“Sherlock,” she demanded in as even a tone as she could manage, “please tell me that you don’t have a pipe bomb hidden in your room.”

“I do not have a pipe bomb hidden in my room, Watson,” Sherlock parroted, looking relieved.

Joan knew better. “I don’t care where it is, I don’t care why you have it,” she sighed, closing her eyes. “I don’t even want to know about it—I just want it safely dismantled by the weekend.”

Sherlock blinked at her anxiously. “Today’s Saturday, Watson,” he pointed out, looking concerned for her state of mind.

Joan stared at him expectantly.

Sherlock opened his mouth, then nodded, a look of comprehension dawning on his face. “Ah. Metaphorical, I see. In that case, Watson, perhaps you could take the first watch in Moriarty’s room whilst I…take care of a few things? I’ll be upstairs in the hall closet if you have need of me.”

He darted out of the kitchen before Joan could agree.

Which was probably for the best—“Sherlock, the hall closet is _right next to my room! What the hell?!”_ —because if he’d stayed in the room, Joan might have thrown a knife at his head out of sheer spite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	8. Chapter 8, Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Moriarty is always right except when she's wrong, Sherlock's jealous streak comes out in weird ways, and Joan is a master eavesdropper who didn't see that one coming. Part One of Two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this chapter feels vaguely unfinished and unsettled, that's because it totally is--the second half is pending (it was just too much for one chapter, in the end) and, though I know I will regret saying this, will be up by the end of the month with a far more satisfactory conclusion :)

 

* * *

_December 1 st_

_“Joan.”_

_Joan was dreaming._

_“Joan…Joan…”_

_At least, she had been dreaming—she couldn’t remember about what; the details were slipping away from her as she tried to hold on to them, streaming through her fingers like water through a sieve—_

“Watson, I’m loath to disturb you at this hour, but your assistance is paramount.”

Joan opened an eye.

Sherlock and Moriarty were hovering over her, starkly outlined in the dark room by the light from the hall.

“ _What_?” she managed to croak incoherently, blinking slowly to help clear her vision.

Sherlock’s rigid posture relaxed minutely. “Ah, yes,” he dissembled, lacing his fingers in front of him. “As I said, I’m sorry to wake you, Watson, but we’ve come to something of an impasse and desperately require your expertise.”

Moriarty nodded, her expression obscured by the shadows. “We need to know: on a standard surgical team for a procedure lasting longer than six hours, which of the—“

“ _Stop_ ,” Joan cut her off, putting a hand over her eyes.

When she removed it a moment later, desperately hoping that she had imagined the whole thing, Moriarty and Sherlock were still standing over her bed, waiting expectantly.

Joan closed her eyes wearily. “One day, I’m going to murder you both,” she muttered, tugging her duvet back up to her shoulders. “And Captain Gregson won’t even pretend to investigate it. Get out of my room.”

Joan didn’t have to open her eyes—she could _feel_ Sherlock going up on tiptoe as he leaned forward. “…So, in the morning, then?” he inquired hopefully.

“I will hit you with a chair, I swear to God,” Joan threatened, rolling over to face the windows instead of her two insane roommates. “Out.”

By the time the door closed behind them, Joan had fallen back to sleep.

* * *

 

_December 3 rd _– _8_ th

Kicking off her boots with a sigh, Joan immediately slid her feet into a pair of ratty slippers she kept by the front door for just that purpose. Her coat, damp with melting snow, went in the closet, replaced by an old college sweatshirt (one of Oren’s, and at least two sizes too big for her, but she’d given up on ever getting her own sweater back from Moriarty). Gloves, hat, and scarf—all as damp as the coat—were draped over the closest radiator to dry, though Joan knew from experience that they wouldn’t until at least the morning. If she’d had more energy, or plans for the evening that required going back outside, she’d have carried them downstairs and run them through the dryer, and maybe picked up one of Sherlock’s ratty old t-shirts while she was down there to wipe the rock salt from her boots before it etched into the leather.

She did neither, opting instead to burrow under an abandoned pair of blankets on the couch and wish futilely for her body temperature to climb back up to something approaching normal.

Winter had arrived.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The brownstone, with its high ceilings, large, numerous windows, and aging architecture, was easily in the running for Joan’s favorite living space since becoming an adult and moving out of her mother’s apartment. Unfortunately, all of the features that Joan loved and which gave the building character also made it impossibly drafty in the winter, the large rooms freezing over in a way that the expensive heating system couldn’t expand to fill.

Joan didn’t like it, but had learned to live with it, digging her electric blanket out of storage once the temperature began dropping into the 30s, lining the floors with as many throw rugs as she could find, and wearing a greater number of layers than usual.

Which, she mused unhappily, lugging her basket full of dryer-warmed clothing out of the laundry room for the second time that week, equated to having to _wash_ a greater number of layers than usual.

Taking a detour to the kitchen, Joan hefted the basket onto the counter and began filling the kettle, another weapon in her arsenal against the onslaught of winter. If she skipped actually putting her clothes away, only hanging up the items that would wrinkle hopelessly otherwise, she would make it back downstairs right as the water was ready to pour over the tea leaves.

“Make an extra cup, would you please?” Moriarty called from the open door to her room.

Joan sighed. Or not.

Still, she added the extra water to the kettle before switching on the stove burner; an extra fifteen seconds of effort in exchange for encouraging Moriarty to ask nicely for things—rather than using manipulation or homicide as a bargaining chip—was no trade at all.

When Joan turned away from the stove, however, Moriarty was leaning on the doorframe, smiling with pointed amusement. “Are you quite certain you’re wearing enough clothing, Joan?” she asked, eyes raking over Joan’s sweater, two long-sleeved tops, fleece-lined pants, running tights, and slippers—which, yes, Joan realized was a ridiculous amount of fabric, thank you. “I could fetch an extra jacket, if you like.”

Joan rolled her eyes, a gesture that had worked its way into her repertoire with a frequency that was quickly becoming alarming. “You’re hilarious,” she informed Moriarty flatly, grasping the handles of her laundry basket. “It may have escaped your notice, but it’s fifteen degrees outside.”

Moriarty frowned as Joan heaved the basket back off of the counter, muscles tightening under the weight. “Outside, yes,” she pointed out, looking…almost genuinely confused. “Not in here.”

Joan scoffed, already halfway to the door. “Does it matter?” she muttered, as much to herself as Moriarty, and if Moriarty had a clever response, she didn’t stay to hear it.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Moriarty was gone when Joan came back downstairs, a bag of Joan’s favorite tea already steeping in a mug on the counter. Joan tried to tell herself that the uncomfortable twisting in her stomach wasn’t slight regret over taking some of her mood out on Moriarty—who often did deserve it, but hadn’t done anything special to earn Joan’s attitude just then.

It didn’t really work.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Captain Gregson had called with a case shortly after that, and the next few days passed by in a blur of activity that culminated in the arrest of a 19-year-old drug dealer, the collection of a truly impressive amount of laced heroin from the walls of his grandmother’s house by the NYPD, and Sherlock looking pale and stricken in the back of a cab while trying—badly—to deny to Joan that seeing such a staggering quantity of his former vice laid out in front of him had affected him whatsoever. After half an hour of bickering that ended in Joan promising to drop the subject entirely if Sherlock promised to call Alfredo, Joan finally trudged up the stairs, curled up in her bed, and slept the sleep of the dead.

When she woke up the next morning, there was a light-weight space heater perched on the end of her bed.

 

* * *

 

 

Not to be outdone by Moriarty—whom Joan had nearly lost her head and _hugged_ after discovering the five additional heaters scattered throughout the brownstone in strategic locations—Sherlock went out and bought Joan half a dozen pairs of absurdly patterned knee socks to match his own, leaving them on the pillow next to her one night while she slept.

It briefly occurred to Joan, as she wiggled her toes in the individual cloth pockets of the grey socks with the neon stars, that she should probably be bothered by the regularity with which everyone else in the house seemed to break into her room while she was right there. It certainly used to, after all.

Instead, she tried on another pair of socks, turning up the heat another notch. If she was going to have her throat slit in the middle of the night, at least it wouldn’t be while she was courting frostbite.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

_December 11 th_

“You’re not slicing them thinly enough.”

Joan sighed, hand twitching involuntarily around the knife she was using to chop a pile of vegetables for the pot of soup on the stove. Moriarty had bought a lot of good will with the heaters, but her latest critique was the fourth such interruption since Joan had started cooking only half an hour before, and her complaints were getting more ridiculous by the minute.

“Are you actually reading that paper?” she demanded, looking over her shoulder at Moriarty, who had an imported copy of _The Times_ spread out in front of her like a prop in a play. “Because I’m pretty sure you can’t read, scrutinize my knifework, _and_ criticize everything I do all at the same time.”

Moriarty’s smile was unbearably smug. “Lest you forget, I possess many talents, Joan,” she quipped, theatrically flipping to the next page of the business section. “One of which is the ability to multitask.”

Joan rolled her eyes. “I forgot, you and Sherlock are flawless,” she retorted dryly, turning back to the counter and starting in on another carrot. “And for the record, I was a surgeon—I’m cutting everything the way I want it, thanks.”

Moriarty shrugged artlessly from the table. “Have it your way, then, but they were thinner last time,” she pointed out offhandedly, scanning the article in front of her.

Joan dropped the knife with a dull _thunk_ on the cutting board. “Ok,” she sighed, turning back to Moriarty and gripping the edge of the counter. “The creepy fact that you can remember that when I don’t even remember the last time I made anything more complicated than a _sandwich_ aside, you can either get up and help me or stop nitpicking. Otherwise, get out of my kitchen.”

Moriarty gave her a delighted smile as she neatly folded the newspaper and rose from the table, as if she’d been waiting for just such an opportunity. “Your kitchen, is it?” she asked mildly, assuming Joan’s position at the cutting board as Joan backed up to give her space, and oh god, when had Joan become so blasé about Moriarty that practically ordering her to pick up and use the sharpest knife they owned seemed like a remotely sane thing to do.

Joan pushed aside thoughts of her dwindling sanity and loss of good judgment—a skill honed to a sharp point after two years of living with Sherlock. “You have your studio; Sherlock has the roof,” she pointed out instead, checking on the chicken stock and slightly adjusting the heat under it. “I have the coffeepot.”

Moriarty hummed in understanding as she began slicing her way through the pile of vegetables—cutting them the same size as the others, Joan noticed. “That doesn’t seem particularly equitable,” she mused, glancing briefly at Joan. “Perhaps we ought to get you a treadmill or a home surgery—a domain for your skills, as have the rest of us.”

Joan suppressed a laugh, imagining how long a treadmill, or anything else with a motor, would last around Sherlock—the machine would be in pieces within a day, its parts repurposed and destroyed and scattered over the brownstone in his wake.

He wouldn’t be cruel about it, though; there was a reasonable chance he’d wait for her to climb off the belt first.

They were quiet for a time after that; an odd, companionable silence broken only by Joan as she opened and closed cabinets in search of ingredients and spices, and by the rhythmic, methodical sound of Moriarty’s knife as she worked. It was almost…nice, Joan realized, stirring the soup-in-progress to keep the rice from sticking to the bottom of the heavy pot. It had been a long time since she’d cooked with anyone—Sherlock cooked in fits of rage or as an excuse to wake her up in the morning, and was prone to wandering off mid-recipe with no thought to the mess he was leaving behind—and she’d largely forgotten the ease of sharing a kitchen with someone else; how cooking became less of a chore born of necessity and more of a quiet pleasure when the work was shared by two.

As Joan might have predicted, the peace didn’t last long.

“Suppose I were to ask you to accompany me to the shooting gallery, to learn how to use my gun,” Moriarty suggested suddenly, fixing Joan with a sideways glance before looking back down at the knife.

Joan…couldn’t even be surprised by anything anymore. “And, moment over,” she muttered to herself, reaching deeply for the inner serenity that not drowning herself in the kitchen sink required. With a sigh, she opened her eyes and resumed stirring. “Supposing you _were_ to ask me to go with you to a ‘shooting gallery’,” she repeated, stressing the term with only part of the derision it deserved, “I would say no, probably with some commentary about what a stupid idea it was.”

If Moriarty was at all offended, she didn’t show it. “I don’t see why,” she answered simply, her hands continuing to work steadily. “You’ve learned self-defense at Sherlock’s behest; this is really no different.”

Joan bit down on the inside of her mouth. “It’s very different,” she countered, refusing to look at Moriarty even as she felt her gaze on the side of her face. “Self-defense is self-protection. Guns—which I already know how to use, since you’re suddenly interested—are primarily offensive; they’re designed to kill.”  

Moriarty raised an eyebrow. “I thought you were a surgeon,” she replied mildly, setting her knife down and turning to face Joan. “Surely you know where to aim to incapacitate, as well as kill. And, as they say, the best defense is a well-crafted offense.”

Joan could taste the iron on her tongue. “I didn’t operate with a handgun,” she pointed out acerbically, dropping the lid on the pot with a bit more force than she’d meant to and turning to the sink to wash her hands.

Moriarty ignored her outburst. “And in any case, I don’t want you to learn to use _a_ gun; I want you to learn to use _my_ gun,” she continued over the sound of running water, stressing the difference between the two with clipped precision. “You don’t like that it’s in the house, but neither have you brought it up or asked me to get rid of it since learning of it. You may not approve of my being lethally armed, but you trust at least that I would use my immediate resources for your protection, rather than against you.”

She paused, eyebrow elegantly arched, giving Joan the chance to disagree.

Joan remained silent.

When Moriarty spoke again her voice was softer, a silky, perfectly manipulative tone that Joan could simultaneously see right through and be lulled by anyway. “I would never allow any harm to come to you if I could prevent it,” she insisted, echoing both herself and Sherlock before her. “But I am not always with you, and Sherlock and I—and perhaps you as well someday, by virtue of your association with us—have enemies that would see us dead. You’ve been fortunate thus far, in that every gunman or kidnapper you’ve encountered has had reason or incentive to keep you alive and relatively unharmed—“

Joan scoffed involuntarily. “How lucky,” she said dryly, trying not to think of all the near misses she’d had since moving into the brownstone; the handful of times she’d been genuinely afraid that she was going to die a bloody, painful, imminent death, knowing that there was not a thing she could do to stop it.

“Yes, lucky,” Moriarty snapped, her eyes suddenly steel, mouth a hard line. “More than you know. And I want you to know how to fire my weapon because someday, you may find that your luck has run out, and that one of our enemies sees you not as leverage or as a source of information, but as a target, or worse: as collateral damage.”

Joan should have been angry. Later, once the shock had worn off, she’d try to figure out why she hadn’t reacted with fury, matching Moriarty’s inappropriate—and off-target—analysis with the scathing rebuttal it had warranted.

In the moment, however, she felt everything drain away, leaving nothing but a deep, unsettling calm in its wake. Reaching for the stove with steady hands, she turned off the burner under the soup before turning to look at Moriarty, whose expression had grown reluctantly wary at Joan’s silence.

Joan locked eyes with her. “You don’t scare me,” she said evenly, and she watched with an almost sick sense of satisfaction as Moriarty realized in surprise that, at that moment at least, it wasn’t a lie.

Joan was halfway to the door already when Moriarty spoke. “I’ll just finish the soup then, shall I?” she asked, voice a touch more ragged than Joan was used to hearing, even as her mild tone purposefully attempted to diffuse the tension that had built up in the room.

Joan ignored it. “Do what you want,” she answered without turning around, certain that not only would Moriarty finish the soup, but that she’d probably use her mysterious resources to get the original recipe from Joan’s senile, non-English speaking grandmother.

She heard Moriarty pick up the knife and begin chopping again. “I’ve made an appointment for 4:30,” she called to Joan over her shoulder.

Joan closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose to stave off a headache. “Of course you have,” she muttered, leaving the room.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

When Joan entered the brownstone that evening—alone; Moriarty had begged off coming home for ‘work reasons’ that Joan really didn’t want to know about, lest the knowledge lead to her almost-certain assassination while filing a police report—Sherlock was waiting for her, sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace and surrounded by at least eight different types of yarn.

He barely glanced up at her before frowning. “You reek of gunpowder and poor decision making,” he declared in a disapproving tone, his displeasure clearly reflected in his expression.

Joan, who had expected nothing less, hung up her coat with weary arms. “I know,” she acknowledged with a sigh, threading her fingers through her hair and pulling the strands into a loose knot.

Sherlock’s frown deepened at the admission. “You know, and yet you let _Moriarty_ , of all people, take you to the shooting gallery despite the plethora of incongruous-but-sincerely-held reasons you’ve used to turn down all other such invitations in the past,” he pressed, a hint of petulance creeping into his voice.

Joan let her head fall forward briefly, the stretch soothing to her sore muscles. “Oh for—the two of you, really. ‘Shooting gallery’—it’s a gun range, not the Wild West,” she pointed out. “And I’m too tired to do this right now, so if it makes you…any less weird about this,” she continued, gesturing vaguely to articulate her point, “I didn’t go because I had a change of heart on the subject, or because Moriarty asked me to. I just…”

She paused, trying to gather her thoughts, feeling both raw and drained at the same time.

Sherlock stood up, watching her with a curiosity that was laced with concern. “She said something to you,” he deduced, glancing briefly at the closed front door before looking back at Joan. “Something to try and frighten you into compliance. But that would never have worked on you, so why—“

“She tried to scare me by saying that anyone who came here to kill one of you would have every reason to kill me, too,” Joan explained, swaying slightly on her feet in exhaustion. “She wanted me to learn how to use her gun so that I could ‘defend myself’ if it happened.”

Understanding dawned in Sherlock’s eyes. “She thought you would hesitate,” he stated, watching Joan as if waiting for confirmation. “But you wouldn’t, would you? Not anymore.”

Joan gripped the back of the closest chair. “I…” she tried, before closing her eyes.

She took a deep breath and let it out. Speechlessness was not a feeling she and Sherlock were comfortable with, especially when Moriarty was involved.

“Moriarty was wrong about me,” she insisted after a minute, struggling to find a way to express what she needed to say. “But only in part. I—people die around me, Sherlock. It started with Gerald Castoro, and it hasn’t stopped since then. Most of the time, it isn’t my fault.”

She paused again, choosing her words carefully as Sherlock hung raptly on every one of them. “It isn’t always my fault,” she repeated, “but it is because of me. Who I am, what I do. If someone aimed a gun at me, Moriarty was right, I would probably hesitate—I wouldn’t want to shoot first, or I’d want to shoot to incapacitate instead of kill, and I’d probably be dead before I could make myself do what needed to be done.”

Sherlock took a step forward, his eyes huge and apprehensive. Joan held up an unsteady hand, silently imploring him not to interrupt. “That’s not why I went, though,” she confessed, looking down at her other hand where it was still gripping the chair. “Moriarty tried to make me afraid for my life, when she should have tried to make me afraid for yours. Because if someone came here to kill you and managed to do it because I wasn’t fast enough, or hesitated when I—“

Joan’s voice broke, and she swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat. “I don’t think I could handle deliberately taking a life,” she said finally, her tone heavy in the stark silence of the room. “But if yours was another death that wasn’t my fault, but was because of me—“

“Watson,” Sherlock interrupted finally, taking another step toward her.

“—I’d shoot to kill, and I wouldn’t hesitate, and I wouldn’t regret it,” Joan finished, her eyes stinging even as they remained clear and dry.

She looked up at Sherlock. “I wouldn’t regret it,” she repeated. “But it’s a very hard thing to know.”

She fell quiet, utterly wrung out. Sherlock, thankfully, was either smart enough or knew her well enough to realize it, and he matched her silence, holding still where he stood in front of her while she gathered herself together.

After an indeterminate length of time, Joan ran a hand over her face. “It’s late, and I’m not feeling that great,” she said quietly, looking down at her feet. She had never taken off her shoes, she realized suddenly; there were puddles of muddy slush on the floor around her.

If Sherlock had noticed, and no doubt he had, he’d ignored them. “Go to bed, then,” he agreed with an understanding nod. “Shall I bring you anything? Tea? Soup, perhaps?”

Joan blanched at the thought of the soup in the kitchen. “Tea, please,” she decided, grateful that he was following her lead. “I’m going to take a shower first, though—gunpowder and bad decisions, remember.”

Sherlock’s smile back was thin.

As Joan bent down and slid her shoes off—she’d clean up the mess in the morning—Sherlock hovered over her anxiously. “If you…” he began, then stopped.

Joan looked up at him, waiting.

“We can ask her to leave, if she’s crossed a line with you,” he said finally, looking back at Joan miserably. “ _I_ can ask her to leave. She needn’t stay, if it comes to that.”

In his voice, Joan could hear echoes of _“Stay”_ and _“Don’t go”_.

“I don’t think so. Maybe,” she replied slowly, putting a hand on the bannister. “I don’t know yet. I need to think about it.”

Sherlock nodded. “Take all the time you need,” he affirmed.

Joan nodded back, and walked up the stairs.


	9. Chapter 8, Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The stunning (ha) conclusion to Chapter 8, skating in before the deadline.
> 
> Chapter 9 may be quite a while in the making; I am spending a large chunk of the summer months on the other side of the world, and will have limited internet access until I get back. If it's not up before July 30th, it won't be up until the end of the summer (but the good news is that I write longhand, so no restrictions there...)

 

 

* * *

_December 15th_

 

 

Ten days before Christmas, Joan woke up _hungry._

It shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. She’d been out of sorts—and had consequently been eating less than usual—since her clash with Moriarty and her feelings-laden discussion with Sherlock, and her body wasn’t happy about it, especially after what felt like half a lifetime of being shaken awake by Sherlock (and more recently by Moriarty, as well) at some obscenely early hour with a breakfast tray and an urgent excuse to chase her out of bed. Apparently her stomach had grown used to the routine, even if the rest of her hadn’t.

Raking her hair out of her face, Joan glanced at her clock, and frowned. 10:54 was far later than she had planned on sleeping, and the fact that nobody had woken her up, either purposefully or by accident, was…

Putting on a cardigan and a pair of socks—her slippers were warmer, but the scuffling noise they made on the wood floors would give her away—Joan padded silently down the hall. Seconds before she reached the top of the stairs, however, the reason behind the peace and quiet became immediately apparent: the distinct sound of the front door being thrown open echoed through the foyer and up the stairs, followed by slow footsteps, muffled cursing, and the sound of something large and heavy being carted into the library and set down with a dramatic _thump._

Chancing a peak around the corner, Joan’s eyebrows shot up: in the space between the fireplace and the wall of televisions stood an enormous Christmas tree. Moriarty was holding it in place, one arm buried in the needled branches and her hand wrapped around the trunk at shoulder height, while Sherlock sat on the ground in front of her, fussing with an oddly-shaped contraption that upon closer inspection turned out to be a newly-purchased tree stand.

Joan, who couldn’t have been more surprised if Santa himself had suddenly emerged from the fireplace, watched as Moriarty used her free hand to gather her hair off of her neck, glaring down at Sherlock with a touch of impatience.

“I have people for this, you know,” she drawled, as Sherlock accidentally sent an oversized screw bouncing into his lap. “They could take over from here.”

Sherlock’s expression was highly skeptical. “You have minions specifically tasked with the acquisition of seasonally appropriate foliage?” he asked dryly, not looking up from the tree stand. “I cannot imagine what sort of training they must endure.”

Moriarty frowned at him. “Your facsimile of surprise is banal,” she informed him. “You know the extent of my network.”

Sherlock paused for a moment, then shrugged, apparently conceding the point.

Joan couldn’t blame him, and she was certain that she knew less.

“Regardless of your obscene wealth,” Sherlock was saying, “which you evidently dispose of in absurd ways, Watson”—Joan ducked out of sight around the corner at the sound of her name, aware that what she was doing was childish and beneath her but unable to stop, either—“equates time and effort expended, rather than monetary cost, with the value of a gift.”

Joan could imagine the unimpressed look on Moriarty’s face at that. “And you live to please Watson,” she said flatly, making Joan frown slightly.

She heard a slight metallic clanking sound, and peeked around the corner again—Sherlock had put the tree stand on the ground. “You’re the one getting sap in your hair because you knew a Christmas tree would make Watson happy,” he pointed out, standing up and grasping the trunk above and below Moriarty’s hold.

Moriarty scoffed at him as they lifted the tree into the stand, nearly toppling it in the process until they managed to shift the trunk further to the left. “Like you wouldn’t have paid a hobo to hold it for you, had I been unavailable,” Moriarty retorted, her voice strained with the effort of holding the tree off of the ground.

Sherlock didn’t sound much better, his face half obscured by pine needles. “Nonsense,” he declared, spitting out a tree branch before finally getting the trunk centered and easing it into place. “I’d have merely done it incompetently right before Ms. Hudson was due to arrive; she’d have been more than adequate to supply any deficiencies on my part. Keep holding that there.”

Without giving Moriarty the chance to protest, Sherlock dropped to his knees and reached under the tree’s lowest branches, doing something that Joan couldn’t see—screwing the trunk into place, if Joan remembered correctly from her own childhood experiences.

Moriarty reassumed her previous position with a sigh. “Does she know?” she wondered out loud, looking down at Sherlock.

Sherlock, who’s entire head was hidden under the tree. “Ms. Hudson?” he called back, branches shifting as he worked. “Yes, she’s well aware that I feign ineptitude in several areas when it suits me, and continues to despair of me.”

Moriarty’s eye roll was wasted on Sherlock. “No,” she said deliberately, shifting her weight slightly. “Joan. Does she know that you’re in love with her?”

Joan choked on her own breath, slamming her arm over her mouth to quickly muffle the sound with the fabric.

In retrospect, though, the gesture had probably been unnecessary—Sherlock had chosen that precise moment to fall over with an astounding crash that nearly took out Moriarty and the tree as well. When he recovered, he glared at Moriarty. “ _That_ is probably the single most incorrect thing I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing you say,” he informed her in an overly-dignified tone. “And if the context didn’t _nauseate_ me by reminding me of the multiple occasions on which Watson had sexual relations with my brother— _on purpose_ , to boot,” he added in disgust, “—I’d mark the date on the calendar and make a national holiday of it.”

Joan didn’t dare look, now that the conversation had turned in all its trainwreck-resembling glory to her, but she didn’t have to—she could _feel_ the condescension radiating off of Moriarty in waves. “Yes, well,” she countered, “Joan’s stunning lapse in judgment and taste aside”—Joan bristled slightly at the disdain in her tone—“just because you don’t want to sleep with her—or her with you, in case your ego was obfuscating that one—doesn’t mean you’re not in love with her, Sherlock. It’s a pedestrian revelation, especially so late in life, but you always were a little slow, darling.”

Sherlock was quick to retort. “And you were always a little eager to find in us every similarity,” he shot back, a bit louder than before. “Even if it required a certain degree of fabrication.”

Joan’s brain screeched to a halt.

Moriarty was entirely less fazed. “It’s hardly something to blush about,” she replied with offhanded amusement as Joan did just that upstairs, trying to keep her sudden onset cardiac episode as silent as possible. “You must have noticed by now that everyone in your mutual lives is a little bit in love with Joan. It’s her gift, the way genius is ours; she draws people in in a way that you and I, and most other people, I’d wager, are incapable of replicating.”

She paused, and Joan’s breathing paused with her as she listened raptly, utterly confused and somewhat flattered and more than a little alarmed by the entire scene.

After a moment, however, Moriarty sighed impatiently. “Honestly, Sherlock, how long are you planning on drawing this out? There’s sap dripping on the back of my neck.”

The conversation devolved into a discussion about ornaments, with Moriarty criticizing Sherlock’s artistic skills and Sherlock insulting her right back over her failure, several years prior, to untangle a string of fairy lights in under an hour.

Joan waited until the sounds of their bickering faded away before slipping away as quietly as she had arrived.

 

* * *

 

 

 

_December 19 th_

 

 

With the exception of her second year of medical school when she was barely functioning on any meaningful level whatsoever, Joan had always found Christmas shopping to be a fairly easy endeavor. The people that she knew well enough to make a genuine effort for were also the people she knew well enough to have picked up on their preferences—what wines they liked, what colors they wore most often, whether a coffee table book or simply a bag of coffee beans would be more appreciated. The people she didn’t, casual friends and neighbors or service workers she interacted with regularly, were typically too pleasantly surprised that Joan had thought of them in the first place to mind the more generic fancy soaps or gingerbread-flavored baked goods that she tended to fall back on.

She also had the good sense to start searching early when shopping for the more…particular people on her list—i.e. her mother and Sherlock. This year, both had been surprisingly easy to find gifts for: a jade green cashmere sweater for her mother was already wrapped and waiting under the Christmas tree in the library (which Joan, in an uncharacteristically convincing feat of acting that would have netted her an Oscar had it been caught on film, had managed to express the appropriate degree of surprise and happiness over), and a rare used book on Mediterranean naval history, of all things, was waiting in the storeroom of Alistair’s former bookshop for her to pick up on the 23rd (Sherlock was a present snooper if there ever was one).

None of Joan’s previous gift-purchasing successes, however, had prepared her for Moriarty.

It was a given by then that Joan needed to get her something. They lived in the same house, for one thing, and while Moriarty was still awful and murderous and otherwise terrifying to think about for too long, she was also the woman who put blankets over Joan when she fell asleep on the couch, and had coddled her embarrassingly when she had gotten food poisoning, and had let tree sap drip into her hair in order to put up a Christmas tree with Sherlock for her because they knew it would make her happy.

Not to mention the other thing, which Joan was studiously ignoring for the present because her therapist was on vacation and denial was pretty much the only way she was going to maintain her sanity in the meantime.

Joan sort of wanted to smack herself for the thought, because the social machinations involved were so hopelessly ridiculous, but _not_ getting Moriarty a present under the circumstances would have been…well, _rude._

Of course, deciding to give Moriarty a gift and _actually choosing_ said gift were two completely different sets of mental gymnastics, and the latter had given her more than one headache after three hours of fruitlessly wandering from store to store, managing to successfully shop for everyone else on her list but Moriarty. Moriarty, who didn’t eat chocolate, rarely read anything in front of Joan except the newspaper, could forge artwork better than any reproduction Joan could pick out (if Sherlock was to be believed, and Joan knew that in this case at least he was), and whose art supplies were prohibitively expensive. Joan had even stared at a rack of beautiful, handmade scarves in five minutes of quiet desperation before realizing that she had never once seen Moriarty in a scarf, or a necklace, or any other type of accessory that wrapped around her throat.

She had put down the blue scarf that had caught her attention and walked away, feeling slightly sick at the potential implications.

It wasn’t until she had only semi-intentionally scared off an overly pushy salesclerk in an eclectic boutique (apparently, ‘my partner’s sociopathic ex who’s been living with us since she was suspiciously released from prison, whose hobbies include murder, espionage, faking her own death, and breaking into my room to leave me breakfast trays and passive-aggressive notes’ was not a description he heard often) that Joan came up with her idea.  

 

 

* * *

 

 

_December 25 th_

 

 

 

Moriarty was gone on Christmas morning, the bottle of scentless gun oil that Joan had carefully wrapped and put under the tree for her (along with a receipt for the most efficient multi-range taser on the market, which was residing with dubious legality in its new home in Joan’s purse) also missing. In its place sat a small bag containing an obscenely large gift card for Joan’s favorite bookstore, along with a fragrant sack of the good coffee—the kind that Joan loved and Moriarty and Sherlock both hated.

Sherlock had wrinkled his nose at the bag, claiming that the smell of emotional manipulation was nearly as repulsive as the scent of medium roast, but had quickly gotten over it in order to present Joan with his gift for her: blueprints he had drawn himself that detailed the construction of a walk-in closet for Joan’s room. “I had them certified by an architect; she was quite impressed by their caliber,” he informed her, hands laced expectantly behind his back as he watched her admire them in a way that only Joan would have recognized as nervous. “Construction should take two or three days at most, once I’ve finished amassing supplies, and can take place whenever you like, provided we’re not busy with a case.”

Joan couldn’t help but remember what Sherlock had said to Moriarty about her value of time and effort over material goods as an expression of love, and equally couldn’t help but think that her book came up short in comparison. If Sherlock’s reaction was anything to go by, however, he disagreed—upon opening the box and seeing the title, Sherlock’s eyes widened dramatically, and he immediately sat down in his armchair to read it, ignoring his tea, his cellphone, and Joan as she got up to make a pot of her new coffee.

There hadn’t been a present from Moriarty to Sherlock under the tree, nor vice versa, but Joan knew better than anyone how little that really meant.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Joan looked in on him a few hours later, bag full of gifts and discreet bottles of wine looped over her shoulder. Other than being nearly a third of the way into the book, there was no indication that he’d moved a muscle since that morning. “I’m heading out now,” she told him, watching with amusement as his eyes darted from line to line on the page. “You sure you don’t want to come?”

Sherlock didn’t look up. “My regards to your mother; bring back pie,” he replied distractedly, flipping to the next page.

It was about what Joan had expected. “Okay,” she agreed, shifting the bag to a more comfortable position on her shoulder. “I’ll see you later tonight, then. Merry Christmas, Sherlock.”

Sherlock waved a hand at her dismissively. “Yes, yes, holiday, natterings,” he offered in response, still too absorbed in his reading to look up.

Joan closed the front door behind her with a grin and walked out into the lightly falling snow.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_December 31 st_

 

 

 

New Year’s Eve found Joan on the roof of the brownstone, drinking sparkling cider from a champagne bottle as fireworks exploded above her in the winter sky.

 

Like many New Yorkers, Joan had never thought much of New Year’s Eve or the exhausting Times Square spectacle that the city was known for. Nor had the overpriced bars and clubs or restaurants that required months-old reservations for a prix fixe menu ever held any appeal to her or her friends, who had for years typically spent the evening gathered together in anyone’s apartment that was big enough to withstand the onslaught. Over the previous few Decembers, however, marriages and demanding careers and childrearing had shifted the dynamic of Joan’s social circle, and instead of a party counting down to midnight, it was far more convenient for them to meet up for brunch on New Year’s Day, children running around the house or restaurant in their new Christmas clothes while the adults drank mimosas and caught up over omelets and French toast.

Joan didn’t miss the old days—she’d seen the friends she had wanted to see in the lazy week since Christmas, and she’d been stumbling home at 3:00am for work-related reasons for long enough that slowly phasing them out of her social life was more relieving than anything else.

During her first winter with Sherlock, Joan had made a point of being available to him on New Year’s Eve, knowing from experience that any date encouraging self-reflection and alcohol consumption tended to go badly for addicts. Sherlock, as he always had in those days, had defied her expectations, throwing himself into a case on the 30th and barely surfacing for air until five days later, not acknowledging the changing year in the slightest or giving any indication that he’d even noticed.

In spite of their mutual ambivalence over the holiday, however, he and Joan had somehow made their way up the several flights of stairs and out onto the roof around 11:30, joining Moriarty on the couch that she had inexplicably tucked into the shadows of the apiary. The air was cool and crisp but also clear, and between the heater at her feet and the nest of blankets in their laps, Joan barely felt the chill as the three of them listened quietly to the sounds of raucous celebration for miles around.

It was Moriarty who lifted the bottle from the champagne bucket on the ground beside her (“If Sherlock’s delicate sensibilities cannot handle a nonalcoholic beverage, his problems are officially unsolvable,” she informed them both dryly, matching their raised eyebrows with an arched one of her own) and cracked it open, letting the froth spill out over her fingertips before taking a sip and passing it to Joan, who followed suit.

And as the ball dropped in Times Square and fireworks lit up the sky overheard, a breeze tugged at her hair and jacket and blew Moriarty’s curls until they brushed over Joan’s cheek, Sherlock shifting slightly under the blankets beside her until Joan could feel him radiating heat, and despite everything that had happened in the last year and would happen in the next, Joan felt only that she was home.


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ms. Hudson makes a discovery in the library, Joan deals with the consequences, and Moriarty's attempt at being a normal human being is creepy and unsettling and she should probably never try that again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …and, hiatus over. It's been a long five months, filled with international sabbaticals to internet-free locales, massive deadlines, needy, rambunctious children, and a broken hand which has significantly slowed my typing down. So that's cool. Given the core dynamic of this piece, I've elected not to take season 3's living situation into account—whether or not I will in the future depends on where CBS goes, I suppose. Thanks for your patience, support, and messages (and kindly note that the section with Moriarty was written before 3.3, and I didn't have the heart to take it out).

 

* * *

Winter drifted by, week after frigid week. The streets of New York were piled with an ever-shifting mass of dirty slush, and the salt and grit clung to Joan's boots no matter how often she cleaned them. Inside the brownstone the space heaters churned away, using an enormous amount of electricity to keep the otherwise drafty rooms cozy and warm, a trade Joan didn't have any qualms making. On the afternoons without cases to attend to she cooked rich soups and stews, warming them all from the inside out. Sherlock made pot after pot of coffee and tea, so many that the lingering scents of hibiscus and jasmine and dark roast were an intangible presence in and around the kitchen. Even Moriarty contributed, unearthing Joan's ancient crockpot that once belonged to a great-aunt to make some dish with chicken and gravy that Sherlock claimed exemplified everything that was wrong with British cuisine—not that that stopped him from eating three bowls of it.

Winter was drifting by, but Joan's world was peaceful. The work was interesting and productive without keeping Sherlock (and by extension, Joan) awake for more than a night at a time. Moriarty had settled somewhat, spending less time antagonizing Joan and more of it ensconced in her chair in the library, writing in her notebooks for hours as the snow swirled outside the window behind her, ink on her fingertips and a mug of tea at her elbow. The upstairs hall smelled of lavender soap and fresh paint, and Joan couldn't remember the last time she'd locked her bedroom door.

Winter drifted by.

Then, two weeks before the first day of spring, Ms. Hudson found Sherlock's stash of heroin.

* * *

Ms. Hudson was watching Joan almost regretfully as she stared with numb incomprehension at the tiny packet on the counter between them. "I was going to shelve that box of books that Sherlock brought home from the estate sale last week," she explained, wringing her hands awkwardly. "Since that meant moving half the library around anyway, I figured that I might as well get the dusting done today, too. But I tripped over the box and dropped a few of the texts that I was carrying, and, well…"

She gestured helplessly at the packet.

"Are you all right?" Joan asked automatically, her eyes not leaving the counter.

She could feel Ms. Hudson frowning at her. " _I'm_ fine; the books got the worst of it," she promised. "But Joan, you—"

Joan sighed. "I know," she admitted, cutting off whatever no doubt sincerely meant platitude Ms. Hudson was going to offer, closing her eyes and turning slightly in order to lean back against the counter. "I just…I'm not sure what to do about it yet."

Ms. Hudson nodded sympathetically. "I'm sorry to put this on you," she apologized, a wrinkle forming between her eyebrows. "I just—I thought that you should know, even though you're not his addiction counselor anymore."

Joan nodded slowly. "I'm not," she agreed, not bothering to correct her former title. "But I'm his friend and his partner and his roommate, and you were right to show me, even if…thank you."

Ms. Hudson nodded in return, seemingly at least a little reassured by Joan's absolution. "If there's anything I can do to help, even if it's bringing over a few dinners or meeting you for a day out of the house, just let me know," she insisted, gathering her purse from the table and looping it over her shoulder. "Whatever you need, Joan, I mean it."

Joan managed a grateful smile. "Thank you," she repeated, looking down until her hair spilled over her shoulders. "I appreciate that."

As Ms. Hudson turned to leave, however, Joan looked back up. "Did you know him then?" she asked suddenly, surprising them both. "When he was using, I mean."

Ms. Hudson paused.

"I…it was hard for me to know, sometimes," she said slowly, after a minute. "He was always brilliant, obviously, and how erratic and sometimes unreliable he could be seemed…part of it, I suppose."

She paused again with a frown, and Joan could tell that she was choosing her words with care.

"I didn't see him that often, I'm sure you know," she continued, "so I didn't have much of a baseline to compare him to. Once I knew he had a problem, I tried to help where I could—make sure he was eating, taking care of himself.

"But I don't have his background, or yours," she added, motioning at Joan with a rueful smile. "I'm sure there was a lot that I missed. And he's so gifted at making you see what you want to see, when it suits him."

She reached out, tucking an errant lock of Joan's hair behind her ear in a maternal gesture that would have felt intrusive coming from anyone else. "He's so fortunate to have someone like you," she told Joan, who tried and failed to swallow the rapidly forming lump in her throat. "Someone who really cares about him, but who isn't so easily fooled. Everyone should be so lucky."

By some miracle, Joan managed to blink back the tears stinging her eyes before they had a chance to fall.

* * *

Contrary to what her therapist, her mother, half of her friends, a sizeable minority of the department, and sometimes even Joan herself thought, Joan's life did not revolve around Sherlock. After Ms. Hudson's departure, Joan went on with the rest of her day: forging Sherlock's signature to pay the utility bills, going for a run, dropping off a stack of books at the library, stopping by the bodega to pick up a few items they were running low on.

It worked, for a little while.

Eventually, though, Joan ran out of distractions. Midafternoon found her in the same spot in the kitchen she'd been that morning when Ms. Hudson had sought her out, Sherlock's packet of heroin on the counter in front of her while a hot mug of tea seared the skin of her palms.

Joan knew, better than most, that  _having_ drugs in the brownstone didn't necessarily mean that Sherlock was  _using_ them. And while it had been a long time since she had been actively watching him for signs of a relapse, she was confident that between herself, Alfredo, and Captain Gregson,  _someone_ would have noticed if he was using again.

Joan also knew that there were any number of reasons why Sherlock could have bought and hidden the drugs in the first place, and even more for not telling Joan about them.

But she also knew that she wasn't Sherlock's sober companion anymore, and hadn't been for a long time. Many of her former clients still kept in touch, and as much as Joan liked some of them and genuinely wanted every one of them to do well, their relationships were still professional. If any of them called her because they were struggling or had fallen off the wagon, she could be disappointed for them, but could help them cope with their circumstances with clear eyes and a sense of distance from the situation.

But Sherlock wasn't a client, he was a friend, and any distance she had had from his struggles was well in the past.

Sherlock hiding the drugs in the library had nothing to do with her, not really, and it wasn't something that Joan would have advised anyone in her position to take to heart. But a small part of her couldn't help but think, in the privacy of her own thoughts, alone in her kitchen with the burning porcelain mug between her hands, that it  _felt_ personal.

That in some small way, it felt like Liam all over again.

And that for all her professional training and experience, not to mention years of living with Sherlock, she felt just as lost and bereft of answers as she had that first time.

* * *

The sky had gone dark, and the tea cold, when Joan heard the front door open and close, followed soon after by the sound of soft footsteps on the stairs. Joan, unsure about what she wanted to do but  _knowing_ that she wasn't ready to do it yet, snatched the packet off of the counter and quickly tucked it into the pocket of her sweatshirt.

And not a moment too soon—Moriarty entered the kitchen a few seconds later, cheeks light pink from the cold.

"Global warming is certainly taking its time," she grumbled good-naturedly. "Any hot water left?"

She picked up Joan's cup before Joan could answer and, frowning at the temperature, poured the contents into the sink and began refilling the tea kettle without pause.

Joan, far too used to Moriarty's frequently intrusive behavior, merely rolled her eyes. "That's not how climate change works," she pointed out instead, sliding the canister of tea leaves across the counter toward Moriarty.

She snatched them up and refilled the pot, glancing back at Joan with a smirk. "Tell someone who doesn't know, darling," she suggested, raising an eyebrow before turning back to the cabinet and taking down a second mug. "One of your politicians, perhaps; I'm given to understand that they're unusually open to receiving scientific education from their constituents."

"Ha," Joan responded dryly, settling back on her stool. She watched quietly as Moriarty finished making the tea, adding sugar and a pinch of cinnamon from the shaker that one of them had left out the day before. Her hair was mussed but dry, Joan noticed—either the snow that had been coming down earlier when she'd been out had stopped, or (more likely) Moriarty had worn a hat on the way home.

Home from where, Joan didn't know, and didn't care to find out. Though she hadn't really flaunted her work in front of Joan or Sherlock since the first few weeks of her stay in the brownstone, Moriarty had pointedly gotten better—or more considerate, really—about hiding any trace of her criminal empire from Joan's knowledge, and Joan preferred it that way.

Of course, given Joan's luck, Ms. Hudson would probably find some rival mastermind's broken kneecap in the library the next time she was over and blow that unspoken armistice to hell.

_Thunk_ —Joan startled as Moriarty set her refreshed mug down in front of her with just enough force to get her attention. She smiled at Joan triumphantly. "Sherlock's done something, hasn't he," she declared almost smugly, and Joan bristled at her tone for a moment before realizing that her attitude was less schadenfreude and more pleasure at Joan's (apparently visible) turmoil being someone else's fault, for a change.

She shook her head slightly. "Nothing I want to talk about," she replied honestly, taking a sip of her still too hot tea and trying to keep her expression as neutral as possible.

Moriarty studied her face. "He's not home from the convention yet," she mused, referring to the orthodontic conference that Sherlock had planned to sneak into in the hopes of collecting bite impressions. "Not unless they've already discovered that he faked his credentials. So presumably, he either left something behind that upset you, or he's done something worthy of your disapproval that went undiscovered until after he'd gone."

Joan sighed, resting her temple on her hand. "I guess it was too much to hope that you'd pick up on my not wanting to talk about it," she muttered, tracing the shadow of her mug on the counter with her free hand. "Though I can see how you might have missed it; my directly saying so was pretty subtle."

Moriarty smiled sweetly. "You shouldn't listen to your mother," she offered supportively, patting Joan's hand and picking up her own mug. " _I_  find your hourly use of sarcasm both delightful and endearing."

She reached into her sweater pocket as Joan sputtered incoherently, pulling out a phone that Joan had never seen before. "Right, then," she said distractedly, unlocking the screen and tapping a few buttons. "Get your coat, would you? The car will be here shortly to take us to the cinema."

Joan stared, still recovering from Moriarty's idea of a 'your mom' joke (or worse, Moriarty's sly hint that Joan needed to borrow her mother's cell phone and 'accidentally' delete all the contacts she didn't personally recognize). "…what?" she managed faintly.

Moriarty glanced upward, looking mildly surprised. "The movies," she clarified unnecessarily, as if it was the wording that was tripping Joan up. "I'll even let you choose the film, if you like, with the caveat that I will not hold myself responsible for my actions if you attempt to make me sit through something… _animated._ "

She pursed her lips slightly, filling the word with a withering disdain that anyone else might have reserved for 'baby murderer' or 'tech support holding music'.

Joan…wasn't any less confused. "Why are you taking me to the movies?" she tried again, watching as Moriarty sent another message with her phone before dropping it back into her pocket.

Moriarty shrugged artlessly. "You're upset but don't wish to discuss it, Sherlock is not home to face the consequences of whatever ridiculous thing he's done this time, and I've no wish to either avoid your company or bear the brunt of your displeasure this evening," she explained in a casual tone that would have fooled Joan if it hadn't been for the visible tension in her hands. "Therefore, the movies."

When Joan hesitated, Moriarty's face grew uncertain. "We don't have to go out, if you'd rather not," she offered, looking away from Joan. "I—we could…hug…if that's what would make you feel better."

Joan blinked, just to make sure it was still Moriarty in front of her instead of Sherlock. "You want us to hug," she countered skeptically, not entirely certain that she wasn't hallucinating the entire conversation.

Apparently she wasn't, because Moriarty was scowling defensively. " _I_ want us to shoot people; that's what I do when I'm unhappy," she clarified irritably, as if Joan's not-quite-a-question had been a personal affront. " _You're_  the hugger in this household, for all the good that it does."

It was both true and not true, Joan realized. She would never have described herself as a tactile person, before. Compared to Sherlock and Moriarty, however…

Joan shook her head. She had no doubt that Moriarty  _would_ hug her, if Joan said yes—undoubtedly she'd done it before, as Irene or any number of identities she had worn in the past and shed as easily as clothing.

But Joan didn't want any of those other personalities to touch her, or for Moriarty to go somewhere else inside her own head just to fulfill a clumsily-made proposal that Joan wasn't sure she even wanted to accept.

God, she was so tired.

"No, the movies are great," she sighed, looking back up at Moriarty and offering her a tremulous smile. "Let's do that."

Moriarty beamed in return, awkwardness immediately gone. "Excellent," she replied, taking a final sip of her tea before dropping the mug into the sink. "I'll get my things. Perhaps if there's time on the way back, we could stop at the art supply shop, as well—I'm planning on painting something that Sherlock will hate, and nailing over his evidence wall the next time he steals my clean clothing out of the laundry room for an experiment."

Joan couldn't help but roll her eyes.

Which Moriarty must have seen. "You can select the colors," she called over her shoulder, entering her own room and leaving Joan in the kitchen. "I see no reason why you should have to suffer as well."

Dumping her own tea in the sink and heading upstairs to grab her purse, Joan decided not to mention that Sherlock had gone out that morning in a pair of lilac colored socks that were at least a size too small for his feet.

It  _was_  her evidence board too, after all.

* * *

In the end, Joan disposed of the evidence in the most efficient way she knew how: dumping the powder down the kitchen disposal (chasing it with several gallons of water, then a round of drain cleaner), thoroughly cleaning the bag of any residue and fingerprints, and burying the torn plastic in a restaurant dumpster four blocks away from the brownstone. It was a decision she'd struggled over, but in the end, practicality won out—there were countless ways to prove to Sherlock that she trusted him not to relapse, but heroin possession was a deportable offense. And given the number of police officers—not to mention judges—that Sherlock had irritated over the past two and a half years, a probable cause warrant with their address on it was certain to come up in their future.

In the tiny hidden compartment that had held Sherlock's stash, Joan tucked one of the sobriety chips he'd palmed at a meeting ages ago to prove whatever ridiculous point he'd been set on making. Along with the chip went one of her necklaces, a cufflink that Moriarty had abandoned on the desk the week before, and one of the glittering origami stars that Ms. Hudson had used to decorate the tray of cookies she'd brought them at Christmas, and that Joan had thought too lovely to throw away.

Maybe Sherlock, observing the missing layer of dust on the shelves and the displacement of half of his library, would check on his hollowed-out book and notice the switch right away. Hopefully, it would be years before Joan's actions came to light.

Whenever the discovery took place, Joan knew she'd given him enough to see the invitation for what it was.

Until that happened, she could wait.


	11. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Spring happens, bringing ups and down and alliances and loss. Probably nobody gets thrown out of a window.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, a new chapter after a long winter. Many thanks to you patient people for said patience, and fingers crossed that you won't need so much of it next time

* * *

_One._  

 

 

After the dreary, endless slog of winter, Spring.

The snow that had plagued the streets and sidewalks and rooftops for months on end melted almost overnight, leaving filthy puddles and mud in its wake for a few days until the ground began to dry out again. Freed from the perpetual demands of increased laundry and cooking and cleaning rock salt and slush off of everything, Joan began running longer distances again, taking advantage of the slowly rising temperatures and lengthening daylight. Sherlock remained sober of substance and manic in temperament, working on case after case in between experiments and an alarming amount of meteorological charting (“You cannot rely on temperature alone when removing the hives from hibernation,” he explained to Joan the first time she found him balancing on the roof with a weathervane, as if he hadn’t given her the same lecture the year before). Moriarty watched them both with bemusement, continuing her pursuits exactly as before.

The promised revenge painting, which Joan sort of liked and Sherlock attempted to mask his hatred for in an—unsuccessful—effort to deprive Moriarty of any satisfaction whatsoever, made its grand debut over the evidence board (and then proceeded to bounce back and forth between the wall and a dusty corner of the basement, depending on who had moved it most recently). Windows were left open more frequently in the mornings, and fresh flowers began appearing all over the house—sunflowers in the kitchen, dahlias in the library, freesia and orchids in Joan’s room. The scents were intoxicating, and Joan spent hours breathing them in, absently reaching out and stroking the petals as she read or worked.

After an ugly, harsh winter, Joan was happier than she could remember being in a long, long time.

 

 

 

* * *

_Four._

 

 

_Everything had slowed down. Cold, it was cold, everything was_

_Light. Beams—car headlights swept across the ground, hurting her eyes. Her head hurt, her head—_

_Hands on the ground; snow, gravel. She was crawling, trying to crawl, but she couldn’t remember wh—_

_She coughed wetly, starbursts of red hot pain in her head blurring her vision, listing to the side until she was back on the ground. Something in her throat, what was—she’d thrown up, before, she remembered, after she hit her head. Her head hurt, it hurt, but she had to keep moving, had to get away before they killed her for real, they were trying to kill her, they—_

_She was so cold_

 

 

* * *

_Two._

 

 

For the better part of two weeks, Sherlock and Joan had been consulting, with little success, on a case that was both new and old—new in that it was the first time that the precinct had brought them in on it, but old in that Sam Maroney and his network of mid-level criminals had been around for years. Their interests ranged from drugs to prostitution to armed robbery, and though their estimated profits were fairly modest when compared to New York’s more notorious syndicates, they had the enviable skill of eluding law enforcement that the other organizations lacked.

“Our last two CIs both disappeared under suspicious circumstances,” Detective Bell had informed Joan and Sherlock while bringing them up to speed on the relevant details, his dry tone expressing exactly how he felt about the official report. “It’s not unusual for informants to leave town without a forwarding address, but these guys were fairly reliable, as snitches go. And Wilson’s last report indicated that Maroney’s planning to expand his holdings, which squares with the latest reports from Vice.

“Not to mention the increasing body count at the crime scenes we’re attributing to him and his men,” he’d added.

The investigation, despite its size and lengthy history, seemed to be going absolutely nowhere. Everywhere Joan and Sherlock turned, they were met with dead ends, deported or dead contacts, or further information that would shortly prove to be useless, functionally sending them back to where they’d started. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so frustrated by a case, an opinion shared by the large majority of the station that had ties to it in one way or another, even if only a handful of detectives from several precincts were actively working the investigation.

Privately, Joan was also concerned about what the outcome of the case would be—there were no discernable patterns, no actionable evidence, no intelligence from the missing informants that Joan, Sherlock, and the department hadn’t already gone over with a fine-toothed comb. It was looking increasingly like the NYPD would be cleaning up after whatever Sam Maroney and his organization had planned, rather than preventing it.

Needless to say, Sherlock found the whole pattern intensely aggravating. His hours grew longer and stranger as the days continued to produce no new intelligence, and while Joan wasn’t happy about it, she also wasn’t surprised to come home from the bodega one afternoon to find Sherlock grilling Moriarty for information, with limited results.

“Not much more to say, really,” Moriarty was explaining idly, barely glancing up from her book as Sherlock hovered over her shoulder. “I haven’t dealt with him personally in years; he was smart enough to only require a single warning when his dealings started to get in the way of my own. One of my lieutenants casts a peripheral eye on his work for me from time to time, but nothing more has been necessary.”

Joan could feel the frustration bleeding off of Sherlock in waves. “The world’s greatest villainess, and all she can tell me about one of her preeminent rivals is that ‘He’s boring’,” he groused, lacing his hands behind his neck and ignoring Joan’s frown of disapproval.

Moriarty glared at him. “Of course not,” she replied sharply, shutting her book with a snap. “Setting aside the fact that _Maroney_ is no rival of mine, I could tell you much more, if I so chose. And you would connect the dots _brilliantly_ , as you always do, and then you could go to your colleagues at the police, and—oh dear, we seem to have hit a snag, haven’t we?” she interrupted herself, eyes wide as her voice dripped with feigned, bitterly sardonic concern. “Now that would be unfortunate, trying to explain to your Captain how you compromised their citywide investigation by soliciting help and sharing classified knowledge with the ‘World’s Greatest Villainess’.”  

She stood up, tucking her book under her arm. “I suppose it’d be unfair to everyone else, salting your viable leads with my association and making you an unfit candidate to follow them,” she mused aloud with a nod to Joan, the first acknowledgment Joan had received from either her or Sherlock since entering the brownstone. “You’re on your own, darling.”

Sherlock threw himself down on the couch as Moriarty finished her scathing tirade and swept from the room, crossing his arms over his chest.

Joan raised an eyebrow. “Not what you were hoping for,” she stated rather than asked, folding herself into Moriarty’s armchair with far more dignity. The fabric was still warm.

Sherlock sighed. “No more than I should have,” he admitted, glaring up at the ceiling as if it had betrayed him. “Not only was she correct that I couldn’t use her knowledge even had she been willing to provide it, but I knew as much before I asked.”

Joan, who thoroughly recalled the many things that Captain Gregson had had to say on the subject when he let Joan and Sherlock resume their consultations, nodded back. “So why did you bother?” she wondered, drawing her feet up on the chair.

Sherlock shrugged, his shirt scraping audibly across the couch. “Desperation, I suppose,” he admitted with a frown. “The misguided belief that perhaps she might twist her world to our benefit, should we require it badly enough. A continued folly of mine, the hope that Moriarty can be anything other than what she is.”

His mouth flattened into a thin line, an expression Joan had become familiar with during the time of Irene.

She bit her own lip.

“I don’t think it’s foolish to want her to be better,” she said slowly, choosing her words carefully. “Everyone changes, to a certain extent. None of us are the same people we were three years ago, and we’ll never be who we are right now ever again. It’s not wrong to hope that those changes are good, Sherlock.”

What she didn’t say: _I think she already might be better._

Or: _The Moriarty who kidnapped me off the street would never buy me flowers or heat my bedroom or try to manipulate me into learning how to use a gun so that she can worry less about me._

Or: _The Moriarty who made you love her only to disappear wouldn’t care what you thought about her._

Sherlock didn’t reply, and they sat in contemplative silence for the rest of the afternoon.

 

 

* * *

_Five._  

 

 

_Footsteps, out in front of her. The light was fading, but she could see someone, dark shoes dark pants walking toward her. Her vision swam and the legs wavered as her eyes struggled to focus, but they kept walking, walking_

_The ground was cold, ice burning into her face and gravel scraping her skin raw._

_The footsteps stopped in front of her._

_Joan closed her eyes._

 

 

 

* * *

_Three._  

 

 

 

 

The third week of the active investigation dawned, and with it came what wasn’t a break in the case so much as a small fissure: a former operative of Maroney’s, halfway through a six-year sentence for an unrelated crime, had agreed to share the locations of all the buildings and businesses that Maroney had operated out of during their brief alliance in exchange for a glowing parole recommendation at his upcoming hearing.

The information he was able to provide was nearly four years out of date, but it was enough to warrant surveillance on two dozen buildings around the city, stakeouts conducted by pairs of officers in 12-hour shifts. The scale of the operation meant that higher ranking officers were being drafted into service along with the beat cops, and Joan found herself bringing coffee and sandwiches to Detective Bell and his shift partners at strange hours on more than one occasion, penance for being barred from actively participating herself by departmental regulations concerning consultants. 

Sherlock, who had been more subdued than usual since his unsatisfactory encounter with Moriarty, began to perk back up. “Finally, something potentially _not_ time-wasting,” he disagreed, when Joan remarked on how she felt sorry for all the policemen and women whose lives were temporarily on hold due to the stakeout. “Of course, if this is the key to the investigation, all but two of them technically _are_ wasting their time by shadowing the wrong location or observing during the wrong time of day, but perhaps they could use the time to their advantage all the same.”

Joan’s next round of bagels and coffee cups were accompanied by language learning cds in Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian, all courtesy of Sherlock.

 

She had just made the final delivery of the night and was on her way back to the subway station when the event that would eventually crack the whole case open began.

 

 

 

* * *

_Six._  

 

 

 

 

_The sounds were muted, but were still making Joan’s head pound. Sirens and machines and shouting—at her? someone else?—and there were hands all over her, under her_

_“—an?” Joan cracked her eyes open the smallest amount, and immediately closed them—the piercing light was threatening to split her pounding head open._

_“Joan, can…hear me?”_

_Her name, someone was saying her name, but she couldn’t follow the sounds any further, none of them made sense, none of—_

_“…get an MRI…”_

_“…contact? She—“_

_“unstable vitals, and…blood loss is—“_

_She was so tired._

 

 

 

* * *

_Seven._

 

 

 

When people woke up in the hospital on television or in the movies, it was always dramatic—loved ones keeping vigil beside the bed, sometimes tearfully; patients jerking awake and panicking, ripping out IVs and setting the machines monitoring their vitals into a frenzy.

Reality was a little less theatrical: Joan woke up, and knew that she was in a hospital bed.

It was the beeping that clued her in, even before she opened her eyes—the unmistakable sound of a heart rate monitor somewhere in the vicinity. Other cues followed rapidly: the strong antiseptic smell that clung to everything, the standard issue (yet surprisingly heavy) blanket tucked around her up to the waist, the cumbersome bandaging that she could feel on her face and hands. Voices coming from her left, loud but muffled by curtains and thin walls and interwoven with the squeaking of wheels and orthopedic shoes on a sleek linoleum floor. The distinct hiss of a ventilator somewhere nearby.

Joan was sore and exhausted but in an absent sort of way, and she wasn’t surprised to see an IV in her arm when she opened her eyes. Her head ached distantly, and as she raised her hand to trace the bandaging along the edge of her scalp, she remembered—she had been running, trying to evade the car that had begun following her minutes after she left Marcus at his stakeout. She’d darted across roads and through an alley, attempting to escape, but her pursuers had had at least two vehicles and were frighteningly well coordinated. The second car had tried to run her down, only missing by inches when Joan threw herself out of the way.

She’d hit her head on something, a dumpster or a brick wall, and everything after that was muddled. Joan didn’t mind (the drugs in her IV were likely helping with that); either she’d remember or she wouldn’t, and until then she was warm and presumably safe.

She was also awake, and not quite pain-free enough to fall back asleep or sit up far enough to grab her chart.

Joan looked around the room she was in—what little of it she could see, anyway. That was another difference between the movies and reality: instead of the spacious, well-lit private room afforded to the protagonist, Joan’s assorted injuries had landed her in the ICU, with its narrow beds, plethora of machinery, and curtains instead of walls on three sides. The wall at her back lacked a clock or a window, and Joan frowned, her mind still tired and fuzzy. Her watch was gone, too, along with the rest of the clothes she’d been wearing, leaving her no reliable way to even guess how long she’d been out—minutes? Hours? Surely not days.

Reaching out with a scratched and slightly shaking hand, Joan pressed the call button to her left and let her arm drop back down on the bed.

The wait wasn’t long—within minutes, a young male nurse in pale blue scrubs pulled back the curtain in front of her and peeked inside, smiling at Joan when he saw that she was awake. “Dr. Watson, how are you feeling?” he asked cheerfully but quietly, checking the machines around Joan and taking down her vitals.

Joan tried to smile back, but gave up when she felt the movement straining one of her bandages. “I’ve been better,” she admitted dryly, her voice coming out hoarse and ragged. The nurse winced almost imperceptibly and handed her a cup of ice chips. Joan took them gratefully, nodding her thanks. After swallowing a mouthful of melting chips—the scrape down her throat was brutal, but the chill of the icy water made up for it—she tried again. “How long have I been here?” she wanted to know.

The nurse held up a penlight, and Joan held still while he checked her pupils. “The EMTs brought you in about three hours ago, Doctor,” he told her, smiling shyly as he clicked off the penlight.  

Joan blinked several times, trying unsuccessfully to clear the spots from her vision. “Just Joan, please,” she replied absently, already thinking about the implications. Three hours—it had almost certainly been Maroney’s men who had followed her, which meant that they knew more about the police investigation than anyone had known. She had to warn them, in case she wasn’t the only target, and she had to get ahold of Sherlock, who would definitely be out of his mind with worry after three hours (plus however long it had been before the medics had gotten to her in the first place), and Moriarty would—

Moriarty would. “Is there a phone I can use?” she asked, trying to sound polite yet authoritative but instead only managing to sound tired. “It’s an emergency.”

The nurse blinked in surprise. “We don’t have room phones on the unit, but I can see about getting your stuff, I think there was a phone in there,” he offered apologetically, clutching her chart to his chest. “But Dr. Ward is going to want to see you right away now that you’re awake, and there’s a police captain waiting to talk to you after that. He says it’s urgent.”

Joan immediately relaxed—the police captain could only be Captain Gregson. “That’s who I wanted to call,” she assured the nurse. “I’d appreciate getting my things back anyway, though, thank you.”

The nurse smiled back, clearly confused by the situation but seemingly glad that Joan was satisfied. “I’ll get the doctor now, and go track them down,” he promised.

Joan nodded, letting her eyes flutter closed for a few seconds. She was still exhausted, the throbbing in her head turning more insistent, and it was becoming more and more apparent that her knee had taken some damage when she’d fallen. She hoped that the conversations with Doctor Ward and Captain Gregson didn’t take long—as much as she wanted to speak with both of them and find out what was going on, what she _really_ wanted more than anything was to hit the morphine button and go back to sleep.

_Crap, morphine_. She’d have to remember to ask the doctor for something non-addictive.

The nurse was trying and failing to tug the curtain closed. “It’s funny,” he offered off-handedly, setting the chart on the end of Joan’s bed and reaching up with both hands to free a caught curtain ring. “I was expecting you to sound British.”

Joan frowned, confused. Her name, her former title, those were both listed in her records, but her nationality would—“Oh,” she said out loud, feeling stupid and sluggish. “They’re here, aren’t they.”

It wasn’t a question, and the polite grimace on the nurse’s face told her everything she needed to know. “Your family, yeah,” he answered, and Joan closed her eyes again, this time in despair. “Visiting hours for the ICU start at 7:00, so you can see them then, if you want.”

Joan let out a huff of laughter. “If they don’t get kicked out first, you mean,” she said wryly, more to herself than to him.

He smiled back anyway. “The staff’s taking bets,” he agreed. “Smart money says they don’t last past dawn.”

 

 

* * *

_Eight._  

 

 

 

Despite the relatively minor trauma to Joan’s head and only moderate damage to her knee, it took nearly three days for the doctors to release her from the hospital. Joan chafed under the restrictions, even as she understood the reasoning—any injury that rendered a patient unconscious was taken extremely seriously, and she’d had enough trouble concentrating for long enough to talk to the police about the incident, or even staying awake for any extended period of time, on the first day that she realized how much worse it could have been. Even when she was discharged—in a wheelchair, of course, and into the care of “John and Jamie Watson”—it was with strict instructions to take it easy for at least two weeks, and not to return to work until after the weekend. The orders were somewhat contradicted by the sheaf of paperwork detailing Joan’s at-home physical therapy for her knee, along with a list of practices in the area for her to investigate and choose from.

Predictably, Sherlock and Moriarty were something of a nightmare to be around, the first few days of Joan’s convalescence: smothering, intrusive, overprotective, and prone to clashing loudly about Joan and what was best for her recovery on an all-too-regular basis, ignoring the fact that Joan was  a.) “right here in front of you and can hear everything you’re saying, dammit,” and b.) a medical doctor with an actual license to practice, unlike both of them.

It was almost enough to make Joan wish that she were back in the hospital, where they were barred from seeing her for twelve whole hours in a row, every single night.

Still, her mobility was temporarily limited enough that the extra assistance was a necessary evil, and the unexpected blessing of her head injury being the most major medical concern was that all Joan had to do in order to guarantee an hour or more of silence was to hint at the slight possibility of her having a headache. She also won the battle over the right to dispense her own medication almost immediately—Sherlock had been disqualified right off the bat, and Moriarty was paranoid enough to understand Joan’s bid for control over her own drugs, even if she didn’t seem to like it—and despite fearing that one of the three of them would snap and kill the other two before Joan could walk again unaided, she really was grateful for their unflagging assistance, especially in the mellower moments where the house was quiet and Joan’s pain medication had beaten back the throbbing ache in her leg and the three of them could coexist calmly and peacefully.

It didn’t last long.

“I damaged my knee, _of course_ it’s going to hurt,” Joan explained exasperatedly to a stone-faced Moriarty, whose arms were folded defensively—or defiantly—across her chest. “That’s the point of _having_ a physical therapist, to get me through the exercises I need to do for everything to heal properly. Or do you want me walking with _this_ for the rest of my life?”

Sherlock, who had been hovering anxiously at the window watching Joan’s PT leave, raised a finger to interject. “I have every faith in your swift recovery, Watson,” he assured Joan, “but the master craftsman who designed your cane _did_ guarantee a lifetime warranty. It’s also, as I said before, impervious to mud, low-grade acids, and weather damage, and can be modified to hold a sword or single stick accessible via the handle, should you so choose.”

He laced his hands behind his back, watching Joan expectantly.

Joan glared at him. “That is _not_ the point,” she reminded him sharply, “and don’t think for a minute that I’m only yelling at Jamie over this; you were right there in the room along with her.”

Sherlock took what look like an involuntary step back at the dark expression on Joan’s face. “That is _not_ the point,” he agreed swiftly, ignoring the rest and earning a similar glare from Moriarty. “The point is…”

He trailed off, waving for Joan to continue.

Joan’s patience for being humored or patronized was always low in the two hours after the pain crept back in, but before she was allowed another two pills to dull the edge. “The point is, you cannot threaten to _viciously murder my doctors just because my leg hurts_ ,” Joan finished for him, redirecting her ire at Moriarty where it partially (mostly) belonged. “First of all, and I can’t even believe that I have to say this again, killing people for doing their jobs is rarely the answer.”

“Rarely isn’t never,” Moriarty pointed out, posture beginning to relax.

“I am surrounded by idiots,” Joan lamented to herself.

She took a deep breath. “Okay,” she sighed, “how about this—this is going to be a painful process no matter who I see, all right? I am going to sound like I am in pain during my appointments because _I am in pain_ , not because my doctor is incompetent or injuring me or whatever you accused him of before you threatened to rip out his throat. If you kill him or scare him away—one of the few physical therapists, I might add, who is both recommended by every orthopedist I’ve spoken to and is willing to make house calls—how many reputable doctors do you think would be willing to take me on as a patient? You will be making all of our lives very difficult if I have to go to New Jersey twice a week for sessions.”

Sherlock made a face. “New Jersey is a cesspool,” he pointed out. “Surely something could be found in White Plains that would suit your needs?”

Once again, his interjection was met with matching exasperated glares.

Moriarty, visibly bored by the direction the conversation had taken, sighed loudly. “I shall endeavor not to grievously injure your medical staff, provided that they follow their basic tenant to Do No Harm to the upmost,” she agreed. “Satisfied?”

Joan leaned more heavily on her cane, suddenly exhausted. “If it’s the best I’m going to get, then fine,” she replied, sighing in return. “I’d better call and apologize to Charlie, before he calls a lawyer.”

Sherlock wisely took the opportunity to slip out the door, but Moriarty remained in the room, watching as Joan limped over to the couch and sat down with a slight groan. “Can I fetch you a painkiller and a cup of tea?” she offered, picking up Joan’s phone from the desk and handing it to her. “Not prescription, it’s not time yet, but perhaps something weaker.”

Joan closed her eyes, tipping her head back. “No, thanks,” she answered, wishing she had thought to grab her heating pad before she had sat down. “I’m fine.”

It was a lie, and they both knew it.

Eyes still shut, Joan listened to Moriarty’s quiet footsteps as they trailed away, then stopped.

“You called me Jamie,” Moriarty said suddenly. “When you were yelling at us.”

Joan opened her eyes. Moriarty was standing in the doorway, looking at her.

She swallowed. “Is it your name?” she wanted to know.

Moriarty’s smile was faint, but ethereal. “No,” she admitted, not surprising Joan at all. “But I like the way you and Sherlock say it.”

She left the room before Joan could think of anything to say to that.

 

 

* * *

_Nine._  

 

 

After an apologetic phone conversation, two favors called in, and a fruit basket, Joan’s physical therapist tenuously agreed to resume their sessions, provided that Sherlock and Moriarty stay out of the room (and preferably out of the borough) while he was over. Unhappily, they agreed to the terms, and Joan’s knee slowly mended.

Of course, they continued to be smothering, overprotective of Joan around strangers, and loath to let her do anything more strenuous than nap or read a book, but Joan dealt with their insanity with a renewed sense of patience.

At least they meant well.

 

 

 

* * *

_Eleven._

 

 

 

The call came in the morning, eighteen days after Joan woke up in the hospital.

“We got the guy,” Detective Bell told her, after apologizing for calling so early and waking her up. “Came into the station an hour ago, looking like someone beat him half to death, and said he wanted to confess.”

Joan tucked the phone into her shoulder and pushed herself up into a sitting position. “Sam Maroney wants to confess?” she asked, voice thick with sleep. “Why would he want to do that?”

Joan heard a door open and close on the other end of the line. “Not him,” Bell clarified, “one of his lieutenants, a guy named Parsons. Wants to confess to his role in the organization, and is willing to testify against Maroney in exchange for leniency. But Joan, he brought _everything_ with him—paperwork, recordings, all the physical evidence we need to lock Maroney and all the top guys away for centuries. We’re still going through it all, but so far it’s checking out.”

Joan raked a hand through her hair. “That’s great,” she replied, far more awake than she’d been a minute before. “I mean, Sherlock will have a fit when I tell him that the case just got snatched out from underneath him, but that’s terrific, Marcus. Congratulations.”

There was a pause. “Joan,” Detective Bell began hesitantly, “there’s something else, something you should know.”

Joan’s throat tightened.

“We haven’t checked his statement against the security footage yet,” Bell continued, “but one of the things Parsons confessed to was riding shotgun in one of the cars that ran you off the road a few weeks ago. Says he didn’t touch you, and that he didn’t receive the orders himself, but that they were trying to damage the surveillance pattern without killing a cop.”

Joan gripped the phone a little tighter, mind suddenly blank. “I…don’t know what to say about that,” she admitted slowly, leaning back against the wall behind her bed.

“I don’t blame you,” Bell replied. “The drivers and everyone involved are being brought in right now. Once they’re formally charged with everything we’re planning on hitting them with, it’ll be up to you what you want to do—if you want to testify, or stay out of it—but either way, none of them are seeing daylight through anything but bars for a few decades.”

He paused again. “I just—I thought you should hear it from me or the Captain, and not from one of the guys sifting evidence,” he added. “I know it’s a lot to process.”

Joan closed her eyes. “That’s—you’re right,” she said, cutting off her original thought of _That’s an understatement_ ; it wasn’t Marcus’s fault that she felt like the floor had just tilted violently underneath her. “It’s—I’m glad I heard it from you.”

Detective Bell hummed in agreement. “Like I said,” he reiterated, “you don’t have to decide anything now, or even anytime soon. We’re going to be processing this case for a long time. And I know Captain Gregson offered already, but we’ve got a whole staff of counselors who would be more than happy to help, if you want to talk to anyone about what happened. Most of them have offices outside the precinct, so privacy wouldn’t be an issue, either.”

Captain Gregson had offered, and Joan had politely declined.

Now, though. “I’ll think about it,” she said honestly, pulling her blanket back up and into her lap.

“I’ll email you the list,” Bell promised. “I’ve got to get back to work, but we’ll be in touch. You want me to call your partner, or…?”

Joan shook her head. “No, I’ll tell him,” she sighed. “Thanks for calling, Marcus.”

“Take care, Joan.”

Joan hung up the phone and closed her eyes.

 

 

 

* * *

_Ten._

 

 

 

The message had come through shortly before midnight, lighting up Jamie’s other (other) phone under three layers of coding before promptly deleting itself. It had been the work of a moment to dress and arm herself in what she colloquially referred to in her head as her work clothing: dark, deceptively casual clothes that wouldn’t shed a fiber or hold a bloodstain; syringes, blades, a steel wire tucked away invisibly, yet within easy reach. Her hair was pulled back low and neat, her boots a soft black leather that didn’t make a sound as she crept up the stairs from her room to the front door.

A quick glance at the clock in the library reminded Jamie that Joan would be waking within the hour for another round of pain medication. She considered looking in on her before leaving, but ultimately decided against it—if Joan were asleep, Jamie would learn nothing new; if she were to wake, Jamie’s best lead in nearly a week was likely to slip through her grasp.

Clearing her mind of extraneous thought, Jamie slipped noiselessly into the foyer.

And stopped.

Sherlock was sitting on the stairs, back unnaturally straight as he waited for her with his coat in his lap.

Jamie masked her surprise with a slow, delighted smile. “Going somewhere, Sherlock?” she murmured quietly, pitching her voice so that even an awake, eavesdropping Joan would have been unable to hear her.

Sherlock’s back stiffened further. “I could ask the same of you, but I dislike redundancy,” he replied, matching her volume. “I’d prefer to bypass the pleasantries, if you would.”

Jamie casually folded her arms over her chest, the movement pressing the knives in her vest against her ribs. “All right,” she agreed, mildly impressed with both his candor and at being found out almost against her will—there was a reason Sherlock was special.

She’d play it his way, for now. “You don’t know precisely where I’m going, but you rather suspect why,” she began, watching Sherlock’s expression for the tells she had learned to read so well over the years. “You do know, however,” she added, “that Joan would not approve.”

Sherlock’s hands tightened on the coat in his lap.

Jamie smiled.

“The question is, then,” she concluded, “are you here to help me, or to stop me?”

Sherlock looked away from her, and Jamie could feel her internal clock ticking, counting down the narrow window of time that remained before her quarry eluded her again.

She ignored it, waiting patiently.

Finally, Sherlock turned back, resolve written on the lines of his face. “Could you have prevented this?” he wanted to know, his eyes glassy and unreadable.

The question was unexpected but the answer came easily; she had asked herself the same thing before they’d even been allowed to see Joan in the hospital. “Unlkely. This was a desperate act, so rashly done that the planning of it couldn’t have been done far in advance. Watson was likely chosen out of convenience, not on a personal level.”

She looked at Sherlock, whose expression hadn’t changed.

_Ah. Guilt._

“Neither could you have,” she pointed out reasonably. “Not without dropping the investigation, which you had no reason to do, either then or now.”

Sherlock’s mouth tightened, the palms of his hands pressed firmly into his thighs. “Watson said the same,” he admitted, surprising Jamie not in the slightest.

She inclined her head minutely, acknowledging his response. “Do you believe her?” she asked, already fairly certain of the answer.

Sherlock looked at her balefully.

They both knew that he meant ‘No’.

After a moment of silence, Sherlock looked away again. “Watson would disapprove,” he said, changing the subject only a little. His eyes flickered up the stairs to the room where Joan lay sleeping, still damaged and in pain from the attack almost three weeks before. “Watson still believes the best of people, despite her now-numerous experiences to the contrary.”

He swallowed harshly, and Jamie could read his internal struggle as clearly as if it had been written across a page.

He looked back at her. “Watson is a better person than we are,” he said truthfully. “I wish to honor that. I trust you to do what needs to be done, and nothing more.”

_And nothing more._ Jamie thought about it, dozens of possibilities flitting through her mind and rearranging themselves, a cerebral dance that she had long perfected.

_And nothing more._

Slowly she nodded, her plan solidifying in her head as if it had always been there, right from the start. “In that case,” she replied, as quietly as she had begun, “let us get started.”

They made their way to the back of the house and Jamie raised the window screen noiselessly—useful, but she’d have to fit it with a better lock—and prepared to slip out over the ledge. A hand on her arm stopped her, and only years of practice kept Jamie from starting in surprise; it was the first time in a long time that Sherlock had touched her so casually, without illness or injury as an excuse. “If anything happens to her,” he began, eyes staring out the window in a deliberate ploy to avoid eye contact.

He swallowed again, unable to continue.

Jamie lay her free hand over his. “I rather suspect we’d burn down the world,” she admitted frankly. “We should see that it never comes to that.”

Blinking rapidly, Sherlock nodded.

Jamie nodded in return and, one after the other, they slipped out the window and into the night.


	12. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of Joan's accident (attack).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not a happy chapter, necessarily, but everyone is still alive at the end, so that's cool, right?
> 
> (It also doesn't make a lot of sense without the chapter before, so here thar be warnin' if you're like me and skip to the end to make sure nothing terrible happens)

 

 

* * *

"Sherlock?"

"Watson?"

"The top hat and monocle on my desk."

"The shoe and the napkin under the sofa."

"..."

"I apologize; I thought this was an exercise of some sort."

"Let me rephrase: _why_ did you leave a top hat and monocle on my desk?"

Sherlock looked up from his spot on the floor. "Accoutrements to go with your cane," he answered promptly, his expression open and benevolent. "Now you'll have them on hand to fulfill any particularly dapper whims or sudden costuming needs."

"He wanted to get you a cape and a spyglass for the opera," Moriarty added dryly without looking up from her phone, legs draped carelessly over the arm of her chair. "Just imagine, you could have been a pirate with superpowers as well."

Joan looked back at Sherlock, whose cheeks had gone slightly pink. "Obviously you wouldn't wear them all at once," he pointed out, the coolness in his tone clearly directed back Moriarty, who waved languidly in response.

Joan bit back a sigh.

"Thank you," she offered, deliberately trying to wipe the petulant expression off of Sherlock's face and defuse the beginnings of a pointless fight between him and Moriarty. "A cape would be...incredibly unnecessary, though, so I think I'm all set."

Sherlock sat up straighter. "Try them on first before you decide either way," he called after her as she headed back toward the stairs, cane thumping on the floor with each step. "You may decide that a cape is just the thing your wardrobe has been missing, Watson."

Joan smiled. "I doubt it," she called back over her shoulder, only pausing to switch the cane to her other hand in order to grasp the railing.

Although who knew; maybe a superhero pirate would make a good Halloween costume.

* * *

Barring Sherlock and Moriarty's disastrous first run in with the doctor, Joan's physical recovery had been going relatively smoothly. After two weeks of home visits, Joan was deemed sufficiently mobile to continue her appointments at the practice itself, which Joan was heartened by, especially since the increased amount of equipment available at the PT studio more than made up for the inconvenience of traveling back and forth.

(Moriarty and Sherlock were less pleased by the new arrangement-at least in part, Joan assumed, because the lack of proximity made it more difficult for them to put the fear of God into Joan's doctors. Not that it stopped Moriarty from going into a murderous fugue the second time Joan came back from the office, despite the extra care Joan had taken during the cab ride home to fix her tear-streaked makeup, or Sherlock from offering to set up any and all of his home equipment wherever Joan chose, certain that he could suitably replicate the PT studio and save Joan the trouble.

"I don't want to know how or why you have any of that just lying around," Joan had responded frankly, "but I'm not using anything that you or anyone else has been naked on unless it's been sterilized by a professional since then."

Sherlock had delicately retracted the offer.)

Between appointments, Joan's mobility continued to improve. Sherlock, in contrast, continued to swing erratically back and forth between anxious to please and irreverently obnoxious-sometimes several times a day-but as that was essentially Sherlock's usual behavior dialed up to fifteen, Joan wasn't particularly concerned for his sanity.

Moriarty, after the case that had resulted in Joan's injuries was finally solved, quickly went back to her usual self— aggravating and unsettling Joan in turn, with momentary flashes of the woman that Sherlock must have loved slipping in almost unnoticeably. The day that Joan went an entire morning without relying once on her cane, Moriarty left half a dozen organic, pink champagne cupcakes in her room. When Joan woke up two hours later, however, only marginally less exhausted than when she'd fallen asleep, only three were still in the white bakery box.

Joan didn't mind-she didn't much care for either cupcakes or annoying, apparently hypoglycemic geniuses, organic or otherwise.

* * *

Four weeks after the accident (Sherlock had called it an attack the first day and Joan had known that he was right, but had paled so significantly anyway that nobody had referred to it that way in front of her again) and one week after Detective Bell had called Joan with the news about the Sam Maroney case, Joan was back at work.

Sort of.

"I'm sorry about this," Detective Bell apologized for the second time as he knelt on the pavement in front of Joan outside the crime scene, fitting the end of Joan's cane with an uncooperative shoe cover to keep her from accidentally contaminating the evidence. Sherlock had ducked under the police tape minutes before at her insistence-he'd clearly been torn between loyalty to Joan and desire to see what the police had been calling a 'virtual bloodbath', and Joan had taken pity-and she could see him gesticulating wildly at Captain Gregson already from where she stood.

"Don't worry about it," she answered, not looking away from Sherlock as he pointed to the remains of the victim's right arm. "From what I can see on the ground...let's just say I'd rather not spend tonight washing viscera off the end of this thing."

Bell grimaced. "Tell me about it," he agreed with a huff, securing the final band around the cane. "One of the techs already found a molar fifteen feet from the body-whoever did this has a major screw loose. And no prizes for guessing who's already got an opinion on the crime scene."

Joan followed his gaze back to Sherlock, who had dropped to all fours, his nose inches away from the pavement. "There rarely are," she agreed. "Am I all set?"

Detective Bell nodded. "Let me get that for you," he offered, leaning forward and lifting the police tape well over Joan's head with one arm, holding out the other to help steady her. Joan took it, more to let him feel useful than because she needed it, and together they made their way across the parking lot and around the worst of the spatter.

"So," Joan asked, giving a coned-off section of the scene a wide berth. "I can't help but notice that everyone is still staring at me, right up until the second that I look back. No luck, then?"

Detective Bell, who had been guilty of the same thing for nearly two weeks before Joan had lost her patience and told him in no uncertain terms to knock it off, had the good grace to look embarrassed. "I've told them that they need to stop treating you like spun glass, but they feel bad," he admitted as they reached Captain Gregson, Sherlock, and the body. "I know we've had this conversation before, so I know what you're going to say, but you wouldn't have been anywhere near Maroney's men if it hadn't been for us. You can say what you want, but everyone here still feels guilty about what happened to you."

"You _have_ had this conversation before, and the fourth iteration is even less compelling than the first," Sherlock pointed out as he stood up, sparing Joan from having to answer. "If they wish to assuage their guilt in some quantifiably useful way, instead of forcing Watson to bear the brunt of their emotions as well as her lingering physical trauma, they may join the dinner roster. I can provide takeout menus if needed; Joan prefers Indian on Tuesdays."

Much to Joan's chagrin, the dinner roster was a real thing. It had started, fairly predictably, with Sherlock and Moriarty's micromanaging of Joan's life immediately following the accident. Food from several of Joan's favorite restaurants, the majority of which she _knew_ didn't do takeout, had begun showing up in the refrigerator, and every medication-induced nap that Joan took seemed to coincide with a new culinary experiment of Sherlock's appearing on the table. Ms. Hudson contributed several dishes, which had met with a blanket approval from everyone in the brownstone, but when Marcus had turned up on the porch with his arms full of Tupperware, presumably trying to return the favor from his own bout of long-term physical recovery, Moriarty and Sherlock had initially joined forces to bar him from entering the kitchen.

("Your cooking skills, while not abysmal, rate a mere five out of ten," Sherlock had apparently told him, Moriarty staring coolly at him with her arms folded dangerously across her chest. "I can assure you that we are indeed capable of keeping Watson fed at a far superior level. If you must make a useless gesture, however, Watson enjoys Thai." Moriarty had, reportedly, chosen that moment to wordlessly thrust a stack of annotated takeout menus at Detective Bell, who had bemusedly taken and made use of them-much to Joan's mortification when she found out a few days later.)

Weeks later, it wasn't any less embarrassing. "That's really not necessary, Marcus," Joan told him, stepping back to let Captain Gregson through after another detective signaled him over. "In fact, I really can't stress enough how much I don't want everyone on the force showing up at the brownstone with greasy orange chicken."

Detective Bell grinned at her. "Are you sure? Trip over something before you leave today and I bet half of them would spring for extra fortune cookies."

Joan, responding in the only way that Bell's comment deserved, made a face at him.

His smile grew.

* * *

It took Sherlock, Joan, and the police three days to solve the case, but in the end they were able to catch the murderer before he managed to track down his next intended victim—the initial victim's ex-girlfriend, as it turned out. Joan's hand was growing tough with callouses from her grip on the cane, despite getting cleared by her doctor to stop using it around the brownstone unless she felt she needed it. It ached in a way that Joan knew was more psychological than physical, and except for rubbing extra lotion made from Sherlock's beeswax into the palm of her hand before going to bed at night, she ignored it-the pain was temporary, it would pass, she would get better.

She would.

* * *

Joan's physical recovery was going very well.

Her mental recovery was…taking a bit longer.

* * *

_Everything was slowed down. Cold, it was cold, everything was-_

_Light. Beams-car headlights swept across the ground, and-_

_Something was wrong. Pain, sudden, intense; everything hurt, everything was pain and blood and screaming and-_

"Joan!"

Joan snapped awake, skin blistering hot and lungs on fire, and everything still hurt, why did everything-

"Joan...all right….safe now...home-"

Something grabbed her arm and Joan instinctively lashed out, backing up until her skull whacked the headboard with a sharp _crack_ and—

_Oh._

Joan was in bed, chest heaving with exertion and muscles poised and ready to snap, skin slick with sweat and sheets kicked to the floor.

She raised a violently shaking hand and raked it through her hair, pulling at the strands that were plastered to her face until they were no longer in her eyes. The door had been flung open and both Moriarty and Sherlock were in the room, Moriarty kneeling on the mattress to her left with a hand on each of Joan's arms, Sherlock standing rigidly on her right, his expression openly stricken. He was saying something, eyes wide and imploring but Joan couldn't hear him, couldn't concentrate, couldn't hear anything but the harsh, heartwrenching sound that was filling the room and making her ears ring painfully. The sound grew sharper and Joan twisted under Moriarty's grasp, trying to cover her ears and search for the source of the sound at the same time-if she could just turn it off, then she could-

"Joan, please, it's all right," Moriarty was shouting at her, letting go of Joan's left arm in order to grip Joan's wrist and pull her hand away from her ear. "Please, you need to calm down before you hurt yourself."

Her hold on Joan's forearm tightened, and some of what she was saying was starting to break through the haze until suddenly Joan realized that that awful sound was coming from _her;_ a rough, panting exhalation that must have started out as screaming but had lost some of its power, even as it was tearing Joan's throat to shreds.

Her vision was starting to swim and, vaguely aware somewhere in the back of her mind that she was hyperventilating, Joan pulled her knees in and curled in around herself, taking slow, shaky breaths and trying desperately to force her lungs back under control.

"Good," someone was encouraging, and Joan could feel a hand sliding up her arm and squeezing her shoulder. "Better now? Just a nightmare."

Just a nightmare.

Joan's entire body was sore, but she didn't trust herself to speak. She forced herself to nod instead, knowing that Sherlock and Jamie would read it as "I'm fine" and "Thank you" and "I'm sorry" all at once.

They were wrong, though, at the same time that they were right-the details were incomplete and they drained away like rain through a sieve whenever Joan woke up, but the fear and the pain and the visceral dread were all real, a real-life nightmare that Joan was forced to relive almost every night since the drugs that had kept her solidly sedated at night after the accident had been weaned away; since Marcus had called to tell her how she'd nearly died in an alley because she wasn't a cop, because she was expendable to a group of career criminals who hadn't even known her name . She had been waking up night after night for nearly two weeks, shaking and terrified and drenched with sweat, only able to drift off into a fitful, dreamless sleep after lying awake for an hour or so. The terror and sleep deprivation were taking their toll on her, and it had been taking increasing amounts of mental energy, coffee, and makeup to hide it. But she _had_ hidden it, not wanting to alarm Sherlock or Moriarty and inspire them to new, greater heights of smothering and disregard for her personal space.

Of course, that had only worked when she'd woken up on her own, without screaming down the brownstone.

She shuddered violently, and the mattress tilted slightly as Moriarty shifted closer to her.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Sherlock rocking back and forth nervously on his heels. "Watson, are you-are you, is there anything you require?" he asked.

A lump formed in Joan's throat. "No," she managed to choke out, "I'm fine, I-"

She stopped talking. Swallowed.

Out of nowhere, tears were pouring thick and fast down Joan's face-the question, the hope and fear in Sherlock's voice, that _she_ had _put_ in Sherlock's voice, had cracked something inside of Joan that had been holding her together by a thread. "I'm fine," she tried to say again, but her voice broke and she gave up, gave into the raw, desperate sobbing that she was too tired to fight anymore.

Moriarty's hands were on her arms and in her hair and Sherlock was crowding close, gingerly touching her back and looking back and forth from her to Jamie helplessly, uncertain what to do in the face of Joan's sudden but inevitable breakdown, and Joan in between them, exhausted and scared and terribly, horribly alone, tucked her face into her knees and was lost to them both.

* * *

Joan was asleep, and then she wasn't.

It was still early when she opened her eyes, the dawn light only just beginning to filter in through the windows and into her room. Blinking muzzily, Joan arched her back, stretching her aching muscles just a little.

Then she paused, holding very still as she looked around her.

Moriarty and Sherlock were curled around her on the bed, still fast asleep on either side of her. Moriarty's hair fell in waves across Joan's pillow, a few of her soft curls spilling over onto Joan's shoulder. Joan could feel the gentle warmth radiating off her skin where it grazed her own: an elbow brushing just below her ribcage, a knee barely touching her thigh.

Sherlock, either naturally or out of his very particular sense of propriety, had kept more to himself on Joan's other side, but his hand had wrapped itself around Joan's bicep so firmly that Joan would have been surprised at herself for not noticing it sooner, had she been awake enough to think that hard. As it was, she was too exhausted to care. Her throat and eyes were red and raw from her meltdown the night before, and both her body and spirit felt battered and worn out. The fact that Sherlock and Jamie had stayed with her not only until she'd fallen back asleep but the whole night through-her own possessive, twisted honor guard—probably should have caused Joan some concern, or at least woken her up more fully, given the body count of one and the extreme reticence of the other when it came to physical affection.

Instead, Joan lay her head back down on her share of the pillows and let her eyes close. _I'll freak out about this later_ , she managed to promise herself, right before sleep dragged her back down into black nothingness.

* * *

When Joan did freak out, its expression took a different form than she had expected.

* * *

"Could you please just, stop? Please."

Moriarty looked up at Joan in surprise, eyes wide and almost hurt, the breakfast plate she'd been bringing over to Joan tilting slightly in her hands. Joan immediately regretted her outburst, feeling her stomach sink guiltily.

After composing herself and getting out of the shower that morning, Joan had reopened the email that Marcus had sent to her after she'd come home from the hospital. Half a dozen phone calls later, she had found a doctor that specialized in career-related trauma and PTSD who was both accepting new patients and was on her insurance. She had an intake appointment scheduled for the end of the week, and she was anticipating it with the same undercurrent of dread as a pending root canal-painful and unwanted, but necessary in the long run.

The reality of needing actual psychological help beyond her token attempts at therapy wasn't sitting well with Joan, and it was making her less serene than usual.

None of it was Moriarty's fault.

"I'm sorry," she sighed, letting her head fall forward until her hair spilled over her shoulders, shielding her from Moriarty's gaze. "It's not-I appreciate you and Sherlock wanting to help, I do. But I can't stand the way you look at me, like…"

"Like?" Moriarty prompted, when Joan trailed off.

Joan swallowed. "Like I'm something fragile," she admitted, looking out the window opposite Moriarty, giving herself an excuse to turn away that Moriarty no doubt saw right through.

She didn't care. "Like I'm going to break."

There was a pause. Then, Joan felt the floorboards shift and heard the heavy sound of the porcelain plate being set down on the table.

"As I recall," Moriarty said slowly, her voice deliberate as Joan had ever heard it, "you once performed emergency surgery at gunpoint, on a man who wished to harm you, with nothing but the contents of a toolbox. All this while being held captive by a large contingent of murderers who had kidnapped you off of the street."

Joan didn't flinch at the memory, not anymore.

She wondered what that said about her.

Moriarty wrapped a hand around the back of Joan's chair. "You, my dear," she said pointedly, "are anything but fragile."

Joan, feeling inexplicable tears pricking her eyes and a lump forming in her throat, didn't respond.

Behind her, Moriarty sighed. "Is it so hard to believe that we care for you, and wish to spare you additional pain where we can?" she tried again, her restless shifting barely visible in the corner of Joan's eye. "We are capable of love-you know we are, perhaps better than anyone else in the world.

"For all that you may forget it on occasion."

Joan felt Jamie's hand on her shoulder and the press of her lips to the edge of her temple, and she squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the hitch that had suddenly begun in her breathing to even out. It took a while, and by the time Joan turned around to look at Moriarty, she was alone.

* * *

Joan knew it was childish, but she locked her door that night for the first time in months.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking from a dream that she couldn't remember, Sherlock and Moriarty were waiting in the hall for her when she stumbled out of bed and opened it.

* * *

For the first few days after Joan's episode (ironically, it was Joan this time who was willing to call it what it was, but everyone deferred instead to Sherlock's gentle euphemism) Moriarty and Sherlock reverted to their previous degree of unnecessary coddling. Most of it was unwelcome-"Seriously, the next person who knocks on that door is getting shampoo to the eye, and nobody will blame me in the slightest," she threatened, after being interrupted mid-shower for the third time in a week-but not all of it was obnoxious or overwhelming, and Joan was pleasantly surprised, turning on the TV one evening out of restless boredom, to find that their sports package had been significantly upgraded just in time for baseball season.

Of course, she lived with the type of people who were less inclined to watch baseball and more inclined to watch _her_ watch baseball.

"This is getting weird, guys," she pointed out from the couch, after catching the pair of them staring at her less than subtly from the doorway for the second time. "Either sit down and watch the game, or find something else to do that doesn't involve lurking."

Both Sherlock and Moriarty took an instinctive step backward, as if trying to distance themselves from Joan's suggestion-slash-accusation. Moriarty, in particular, looked entirely underwhelmed by the idea. "What would be the point, when the ending is already a foregone conclusion?" she pointed out with a nod at the television, where the score was tied in the bottom of the fourth inning. "It's obvious that-"

"Allow me to interrupt you are offer you the benefit of my previous experience," Sherlock cut her off, hands laced behind his back. "Watson does not take kindly to having her national pastime spoiled in advance, despite the additional waking hours and potential gambling spoils it would gain her by knowing the outcome at the start of play."

He pursed his lips, clearly disapproving of Joan's irrationality.

"Besides," he added as an afterthought, looking back at Moriarty, "you're wrong-the third baseman's fumble in the coming play will gain his opponents two additional 'runs batted it', as they're called."

Moriarty scoffed. "Obviously," she counted derisively. "But the first baseman's catch and subsequent pass will end the next inning prematurely, you do realize."

Sherlock frowned at her. "Extremely unlikely," he disagreed. "I can only see this going one way, and it is entirely without a miracle play from a substandard player with a dormant calf injury."

Moriarty glared back at him. "We'll see who's wrong," she said archly, stalking over to the couch and folding herself petulantly into the corner of it right next to Joan, who had been watching the back and forth between them with something approaching incredulity. "Fetch the popcorn, sit down, and prepare to humble yourself to my superior intelligence; we're doing this properly if we're doing it at all."

Sherlock, affronted, whipped around and stomped out of the room. "It'll be you," Joan could hear him call loudly from the stairs down to the kitchen. "Your conclusion is staggering in its ignorance, and I am embarrassed for you in advance."

* * *

Moriarty and Sherlock spent the entire game, and evening afterward, yelling at both the television and each other.

Joan, seated between them on the couch with her Mets hat and her bowl of popcorn, couldn't help but look back and forth from one face to the other with a small smile.

_Yeah,_ she thought to herself, when a wild pitch in the eighth inning caused identical howls of frustration from either side of her, followed by shouting, an upended glass of water, and an accidentally flung remote almost breaking the television screen. _Maybe this is love._


End file.
